This is your brain on drugs: How, when, why, and where to microdose shrooms

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Sep 08, 2024

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Microdosing the magic mushroom

A couple’s journey through love, loss, and the language of connection

By Andrea Bauer

*Disclaimers: Names have been changed to protect privacy. Quotes have been edited for clarity.

The first time I tripped on magic mushrooms, I saw the Mothership land. I mean that quite literally since the activity of the day was seeing George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars perform live, complete with their iconic “vehicle of funk deliverance.” It was 1996, I was in college, and looking back, I can scrape together hazy memories of skipping arm-in-arm with my girlies through a cartoonish land on a beautiful spring day. Despite the awe of witnessing the P-Funk through my dilated pupils, the memory that sticks with me most is what happened on the comedown. After the show, I floated home; the landscape, once dripping with vivid colors and softened edges, had returned to its usual shapes. I stopped to pick up cigarettes (it was the ’90s!) at the campus Kum & Go, where I ran into my frenemy. (We despised each other but remained civil because — much to my resentment and annoyance — we shared a best friend.) He was sitting on the curb smoking an Old Gold. The final traces of psilocybin dancing through my bloodstream had me feeling uncharacteristically charitable, so I plopped down beside him.

“You seem different,” he said, cocking his head and squinting at me.

“Oh yeah? Like how?” I said, not wanting to reveal my secret.

He gestured with his hands as if to draw an aura outlining my body. “You have a glow about you. And you seem … nicer?”

Something between us shifted. A barrier that, just yesterday, had seemed insurmountable miraculously dissipated. From that day forward, we were not only for-real friends, but we became pretty much inseparable for the rest of our college experience.

Years later, I had another experience. Now a full-fledged adult, my partner and I brewed some magic mushroom tea and had a lovely time which we fondly recall as “The Day We Went to Peace Planet.” We sat on a rooftop and watched a sunset so stunning I declared I would have paid good money to see it. But again, it was the residual goodness of the post-trip experience that stuck. As I strolled through my neighborhood the following day, strangers were suddenly smiling at me, stopping me just to say hello, encouraging me to pet their dogs. What the fuck was going on? Had I shed my plastered-on city scowl that normally arms me with don’t-talk-to-me vibes? Did this always happen, and I just hadn’t noticed? Or did I just seem … nicer? The Carrie Bradshaw in me couldn’t help but wonder: Is the true magic of the mushroom not in the hallucinogenic journey, but in the destination?

Part one: Love

In a bustling oyster bar, I meet up with chef-turned-mushroom-cultivator Terence* and his girlfriend Alice*, a creative director and foodie-at-heart who has been navigating a tragic loss with a little help from the psychedelic mushroom. “Mushrooms teach you about connection,” says Terence. “From spore to mycelium to mushroom fruiting body to spore again, they’re all the same form of life. They just continue in a circle, and you see it happen really rapidly.” We munch on sea creatures while he describes the fungi’s life cycle, and I derail us with questions about whether the cordyceps mushroom can really take over your brain like it does in the HBO series The Last of Us. (The answer is no.) The science of the mushroom life cycle feels both over my head and surprisingly simple, familiar even. But this duality, I learn, is inherent to the mushroom. It embodies the concept of “both/and.” People often have a hard time describing their psilocybin experiences because they are complex and abstract, but the lessons learned from communing with the plant are often quite simple. “The experience is like downloading the language that the mushroom speaks,” says Terence. “You understand it on a deep level because, somewhere, you’ve always known that you’re part of this life cycle and nature. Just as cats see different wavelengths and dogs hear different frequencies — just because we don’t perceive it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Nature exists on a whole different level — trees feel things, mushrooms perceive things. So, you experience a different language and way of being when you communicate with a plant.”

Terence got into cultivating a highly sought-after (non-psychedelic) cordyceps mushroom after feeling burnt out mentally, spiritually, and physically from working in a kitchen (think: The Bear). “I had always been interested in holistic health and had known about mushrooms in traditional Chinese medicine like Reishi, Turkey Tail, all these different mushrooms with health benefits.” At the time, mushroom cultivation was still a niche, punk rock scene, with most knowledge being shared in underground internet forums. “Learning about mushrooms was exciting because it seemed like the final frontier in understanding our place in nature. The people who were doing it really cared about it,” he says. “It was before Target was selling, like, mushroom T-shirts. It wasn’t trending.”

It’s no secret to my Instagram algorithm that when it comes to exploring consciousness, I’m a seeker. The robot shamelessly bombards me with ads for “consciousness-enhancing” tinctures, “mind-altering” meditation apps, CBD, THC, ketamine therapy, and most recently, microdosing magic mushrooms. This increasingly prevalent wellness trend reaches far and wide — from Silicon Valley execs wanting to tap into flow states at work to veterans seeking treatment for PTSD to the microdosing moms who are trading in their mommy juice for the less destructive, and arguably more constructive, ’shroom. Even Gwyneth Paltrow is doing it. I’m determined to find out if microdosing really could heal us all.

Part two: Loss

Kidney cancer begins in silence. In its early stages, there are often no signs or symptoms, making it difficult to detect. In fact, most kidney tumors are discovered accidentally. By the time symptoms appear, the cancer is usually at a more advanced stage, significantly reducing the chances of survival.

“From the moment he was diagnosed, we knew he was going to live with it for the rest of his life. We learned that there wasn’t much more we could do for him, and that was really hard.” Alice’s father was dying, and there was nothing she could do to save him.

The inevitable death of a parent is a rite of passage many of us will come face to face with sooner or later, if we haven’t already. And while we know, in our logical minds, that this will happen someday, it’s easier to cast off the thought as a problem for a future date. We tuck the idea away in a drawer, sweep it under the bed, hoping that when the time comes, we’ll be older, wiser, better prepared, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll be a little less scared.

“There’s no way you can prepare yourself for it, even when you see it coming from a mile away like we did,” Alice says. “My therapist recommended a book called Being Mortal. It was a great book to read, and it offered such a rational perspective. But when you’re facing the mortality of a parent, it’s hard to connect that to your rational brain. There’s something not even human about that — it’s unrealistic to think you can just explain it to yourself.”

To take on life’s biggest question, Alice sought refuge in microdosing the magic mushroom. “I was confronting something that was more difficult than I knew how to make sense of with my normal abilities,” she says. “Microdosing was something that I wanted to try and see if I could get anything out of it, and I found that I really did.”

With a regimen of capsules containing .28 grams of dried mushrooms, Alice braved the uncomfortable inevitable, head-on and little by little. Like many others, she finds it challenging to articulate her microdosing experiences. “It’s hard to describe in words because you’re being given a different language, but it makes more sense to you than, you know, books that your therapist provides, or even support from friends and family. When I was microdosing with the intention to sit with all that was going on with my dad, I understood on a deep level that it was all part of a cycle,” she explains. “A lot of what I was dealing with was this sense that it’s scary and unfair. Microdosing simplified things for me, [making death feel like] a natural part of life rather than a scary and bad thing. I’ve felt really comforted and held by it, instead of fighting against it.”

Death, dying, loss, grief. These are all words that we, as a collective society, tend to avoid and resist. We often feel unequipped to talk about death, especially with the dying. While Alice’s dad preferred not to discuss the elephant in the room, microdosing helped her feel connected to his experience. “It made me feel more like a part of it than shut out from it,” she says. “Watching someone battle cancer is difficult because you feel so helpless. But [microdosing] helped me understand that I wasn’t falling short. It was more about being part of the experience and knowing that’s just how it is … it’s just the next thing.”

Only three years after his diagnosis, Alice’s dad passed away. Ultimately, dipping a toe down the mushroom rabbit hole helped her find the one thing that is so elusive in our most challenging moments: acceptance.

“It was really hard, but I felt more ready to accept it because of my experience with the mushrooms,” she says. “It was comforting to realize that I didn’t have to assign positive or negative to it; it just was the natural [course of life.]”

Terence shares the sentiment. “There is something very spiritual about mushrooms,” he says. “They offer the language of connection that is like, ‘you are part of everything that is.’ You suddenly feel way less disconnected from literally everything. You accept suffering, you accept darkness, and your own shadow.”

Psychedelic magic mushrooms are being researched to see the benefits of psilocybin used in psychedelic therapy

Part three: Microdosing 101

This is your brain on drugs: How psilocybin works

Psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, has a similar structure to serotonin, the body’s “feel good” hormone. It enters the brain via those same serotonin receptors, which can lead to changes in mood, perception, and thought processes.

Research suggests that psilocybin can also enhance neuroplasticity and increase communication between different parts of the brain, helping the brain break free from rigid thought patterns and improving mental flexibility. This could be beneficial for treating depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, seasonal depression, and other mental health conditions.

What is microdosing?

Microdosing is typically defined as taking approximately 1/10^th or less of a full recreational dose of a psychedelic, usually LSD or psilocybin, to get the health benefits of the drug without experiencing the hallucinogenic effects. The idea is that it’s sub-perceptual — an amount so small you may not even notice it as you go about a normal day.

There are levels of dosing psychedelics. The breakdown typically goes like this: a microdose, a gentle dose, a museum dose (as in, you might like to spend time just walking around a museum and looking at things), a strong dose (typically the amount used in psychedelic healing, and should only be done with a trip-sitter, guide, or therapist) and a heroic dose (full-on tripping at a level where people often have spiritual or life-changing breakthroughs. Like a strong dose, a heroic dose should never be done alone.)

It may take some trial and error to find your ideal microdose. “Some people are just naturally very sensitive, and some people naturally have a very high tolerance,” says Terence. What might feel like a museum dose to some can feel like a heroic dose to others, so it’s important to start small and see how it affects you.

“With a true microdose, you’re definitely not gonna trip. You might not even notice anything,” Terence says. “You might get a little excitement in your chest and colors might become a little sharper. What it does is it subtly dampens your ego, so you become a little bit more open. Your brain becomes a little bit more flexible to knocking out bad stuff and old thought patterns.”

Continue reading here

This article was originally published yesterday here on the-midst.com.

Find author Andrea Bauer on Substack here.

Did this commercial scare the sh*t out of you, too?

Omelets for brains are a good scare tactic for youngsters. But as an adult woman with eggs-pert knowledge at her fingertips, you might find that the benefits of drugs like shrooms and weed egg-ceed rumored harms, allowing you to eggs-press yourself in ways you otherwise wouldn’t, outlined above and below.

Your brain on these drugs might not be a scrambled, fried mess after all. It might, instead, be an egg-ceptionally healthy, healing version of you. Any questions? (Thanks for reading my punnies — I crack myself up.)

—Lauria

By Lauria Locsmondy

5 reasons why I started smoking weed in my 40s

Always late to the party, I started enjoying weed in my 40s. Laced attempts in my youth and a punk-rock preference for alcohol distanced me from cannabis and the Birkenstock-up kids smoking it. Stoned looked too boring, and “drug dealers” seemed too scary. Yet, now with the growing legalization — and accessibility — of cannabis in every form from gummies to grass, what was once strange seems safe. I blame Nancy Reagan for this misunderstanding and (while this is a much larger socio-racial issue) want to shine some light on why it’s healthy for us women to get lit.

1. High expectations: Cannabis increases orgasms

Cannabis helps women who have difficulty having orgasms — and enhances the frequency and quality of women’s orgasms, according to Psychology Today. In fact, a recent study in Sexual Medicine concludes that women who used weed before sex and those who partook more frequently were more than twice as likely to report satisfactory orgasms as those who did not. Many call it an aphrodisiac, while others say it simply reduces performance anxiety — a terrible reason not to get off.

2. Budding research: Cannabis eases perimenopausal symptoms

Decreased estrogen levels, or the onset of menopause, can lead to an overwhelming list of symptoms, including insomnia, anxiety, and hot flashes, as reported in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society.

The journal’s study assessed 258 participants and determined that 86% of surveyed women use cannabis to ease certain perimenopausal symptoms, such as low libido, mood or anxiety, and trouble sleeping. These perimenopausal women reported the most severe symptoms in the group and were the greatest endorsers of cannabis for their relief. Why the accolades? Menopause suggests that cannabis works to dim the prefrontal cortex, which ultimately helps us calm down and reduces these annoying symptoms.