How To Start Microdosing Psychedelics: A Beginner’s Guide
Microdosing is easy, and a lot of people like how it feels. Just:
- Choose your medicine: most people do LSD or mushrooms.
- Start low: Break off a tiny bit of a mushroom, or cut off a sliver of an LSD tab.
- Dose in the morning: Psychedelics interfere with sleep, so you want to come down before dinner.
- Track your mood: Do you feel woozy, wobbly, anxious or speedy? You took too much. Lower your dose next time. Do you feel calm, centered, and in the flow of life? Enjoy the feeling, and do it again. Feel nothing? Try a little more next time.
- Set an intention: Simple things work best, like, “Feel my feelings,” “Be present,” “See what’s here.”
- Do something comfortable: Start on a day you don’t have to work or care for others, and don’t venture far from home. Do things you like–a hobby, say, or a walk in the park. Later, you can try working and socializing.
- Don’t drive: Or do anything dangerous.
- Skip days: Don’t microdose every day. Leave two or three days between your doses. This resets your tolerance.
- Stop. Don’t microdose for the rest of your life. Stop after a month or two to come back to your regular self.
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How To Start Microdosing: Pick Your Psychedelic
Now, we’ll talk details.
The most common options are LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. However, other users will microdose with mescaline, DMT, and compounds similar to LSD (e.g. 1P-LSD) and psilocybin (e.g. 4-AcO-DMT).
Microdosing LSD
Benefits
- Long-lasting, so you can experience effects for the whole day.
- Affordable: LSD is cheap.
- There are multiple studies showing benefits from microdosing LSD.
Downsides
- Long-lasting: this can be a downside, as well as a benefit. If you microdose LSD or a similar compound too late in the day, it may affect your ability to sleep.
- What you think is LSD could actually be a more harmful substance like DOx compounds or 25I-NBOMe. These drugs are toxic. Real LSD, in contrast, is non-toxic.
Microdosing Psilocybin Mushrooms
Benefits
- Short-lasting: you can experience the effects of microdosing for a good chunk of your day but not the whole day.
- Grow mushrooms is pretty easy. So getting a supply may be easier than synthetics like LSD, DMT, and MDMA.
Downsides
- Some users would prefer the effects of microdosing to last the whole day.
- Some people believe mushrooms have an “agenda” that may not be the same as yours.
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Microdosing DMT
Benefits
- A DMT trip experience is often brief, but it may provide an afterglow that lasts for the rest of the day.
- Research suggests that microdosing DMT may effectively alleviate depression and anxiety.
Downsides
- To microdose DMT, you’ll need the proper equipment for smoking or vaporizing it.
- Depending on your reasons for microdosing (e.g. productivity), you may not find DMT as effective compared to a longer-lasting compound like LSD.
Microdosing MDMA
Benefits
- MDMA is known to produce empathic, pro-social feelings.
- MDMA is less likely to induce feelings of anxiety compared to substances like LSD and psilocybin.
Downsides
- In our guide on microdosing MDMA, we cautioned against taking microdoses of this particular compound. MDMA has a greater risk of abuse and various health risks.
- To stay safe, you should only microdose MDMA every once in a while. Maybe once a month at most.
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How To Start Microdosing: Getting An Accurate Dose
Volumetric Dosing
Volumetric dosing works for compounds like LSD and 1P-LSD that come in the form of tabs. Ideally, the tabs would be dosed in a way that is easily divisible (e.g. 100 or 200ug).
Take, say, a 100ug tab of LSD, and place it in a bottle. Next, add 100ml of distilled water or grain alcohol (e.g. gin or vodka) or a half-and-half mix of distilled water and grain alcohol into the amber bottle. Give it a shake and leave it for a day, so that the LSD has time to be distributed throughout the liquid.
Then, using a 10ml syringe, you can take out your microdose. 1ml would correspond to 1ug of LSD, roughly.
Powderizing Your Mushrooms
To accurately microdose psilocybin mushrooms, you ideally want to powderize them, so that each time you microdose, you will likely get the same concentrations of psilocybin and psilocin. For example, you can create magic mushroom powder by using a coffee grinder.
Weigh your dose on a small scale.
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How To Start Microdosing: Creating A Regimen
Pioneer James Fadiman recommends his own protocol of one day on and two days off. This means you microdose one day — ideally in the morning — then have a two-day break until your next dosage.
If you tried to microdose the next day using the same dose, you may experience reduced effects, or perhaps no effects at all.
Another reason for leaving a gap between days is that many people experience benefits the next day, and perhaps even the day after that.
Fadiman also recommends that you limit your microdosing regimen to four to eight weeks, with two to four weeks rest before (if) you start microdosing again.
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Concerns About Taking Small Doses Of Psychedelics
Some scientists have concerns about the potential heart complications from long-term microdosing. Taking small doses of psychedelics for a limited amount of time, then, is a good harm reduction practice.
Keep in mind that any microdosing regimen may involve an element of trial and error. You might need to adjust your dosage, or change the compound, before finding out what suits you best.
Moreover, make sure that you’re mindful of how your mental health changes (if at all) during your microdosing regimen. It’s why using one of a handful of microdosing apps may prove helpful.
According to a study published in Harm Reduction Journal in 2019, the potential benefits of microdosing psychedelics are most apparent related to mood and focus.
Participants saw improvements in mood (26.6%), focus (14.8%), and creativity (12.9%). Additionally, some challenges were reported as well, with issues like illegality and physiological discomfort among the most prevalent concerns.
The figure below shows a more in-depth look at some of the benefits (and challenges) from participants who took part in the study. (Image via “Psychedelic microdosing benefits and challenges: an empirical codebook”)
A gram of psilocybin mushrooms costs about $10 (depending on the species), whereas an eighth of shrooms costs about $40. LSD tabs cost $4 to $10. So a microdose costs about $1.
Disclaimer: We do not endorse the illicit use of Schedule 1 psychedelic compounds in a non-therapeutic setting. We do, however, hope the regulations look at the research to understand how these drugs can used in powerfully positive ways.
