My interest in microdosing started specifically after learning of the studies taking place at Johns Hopkins, touting psilocybin to be a breakthrough medicine, effective in treating a multitude of mental health conditions. Having ongoing struggles with moderate depression, I’ve also sought help in treating anxiety, PMDD, and a chain of health complications due to being a type one diabetic my entire life. After deciding to try this for my mental health, I was having trouble in sourcing this option, and decided with my partner, to grow our own.

I tried to microdose while I was on an SNRI (antidepressant), and thought the effects were diminished significantly, and was having other issues with it, so with the help of my doctor, I stopped taking it.

I started off by filling capsules by hand, weighing in at 300mg/.3g each. While I was on the SNRI, this dosage was barely noticeable, but as my body adjusted to not taking it, I found the 300mg dosage was giving me a lot of euphoria. I started with a 5 day on, 2 off schedule. (Great! I like euphoria! It helped my mood a lot, but at times I felt I shouldn’t take it while working as I was feeling more loopy/couldn’t concentrate much). I started reading about things I could add to the capsules, if I started filling them with less of the dosage. I stuck to a microdose of 250mg with added cacao for several months, and really noticed a lot of benefits. My mood seemed brighter, like I was kinda just giddy and happy go lucky for no other reason. I had more energy, it helped me look forward to going to work at my bud tending job, which at times was stressful due to work environment, I’m very empathic and can stick to negative interactions or experiences more than I’d prefer. In my real life am not very outgoing, but felt it was easier to form connections with people.

Beyond that, I found it was much easier to focus on things, to maintain concentration, which has never been very easy for me. It would help me access more creativity if I were to dose on a day where I was working on a creative task.

Although I felt that cognitive behavioral therapy helped me a ton with anxiety and depression, I noticed a large difference in how little things that used to set my anxiety off, we’re easier to shrug off and let go.

For a long time, I would feel incredible on the days I would dose, but my off days were somewhat of a return to baseline, and I found especially in the beginning, were a challenge. But then, something amazing happened. I started to feel really good on the days off, too. This prompted me to start to cut back my schedule, first to 4/3, then 3/2 or 2/1. I started to take capsules more intuitively, like today feels like a good day to take one, or maybe not today as I’ve been taking them a lot lately and could use a day off.

Recently, I took a whole week off. And felt totally ok with that. I’ve since cut back my dosage to 150-200mg most days that I dose, and found the combination with lion’s mane and niacin to be desirable and one I use more often. I truly believe that this regimen has helped to treat my conditions in ways that at least 5 different pharmaceuticals (I’ve tried many!) have not been able to. Overall, I think the difference is that I’m no longer trying to suppress negative feelings, I’m trying to acknowledge them and think of better ways to cope, better ways to think about things.

This isn’t to say I don’t have hard days, moments of self doubt, burdensome guilt, negative self talk, or just straight up sadness. This last year + has been incredibly difficult for so many reasons, and for a long time I felt my depression was largely situational. But we all have bad days. It’s human. And I really think that microdosing has helped me to be a better and more efficient, optimistic and unbreakable human.

And, as a side note, I’ve been an avid cannabis user for years. Cannabis has the downside of building up a tolerance, so it would always be nice to feel the need to smoke less. With regular microdosing, I noticed that smoking started to feel less “necessary”, or more frivolous. I found (slightly-) less of a desire to smoke 24/7. I’ve found that my desire for alcohol has also lowered a lot. I would set out to drink a few beers and find myself stopping after one. Or not even really wanting to drink. Which is awesome! I believe there is a lot of hope in psychedelics used for addiction therapy as well.