Microdosing Magic Mushrooms: How to Prepare the Doses

If you are looking to lower your stress, improve your focus, increase your emotional openness, and receive the many other benefits of microdosing magic mushrooms, you will need to know two main things: how to get magic mushrooms and how to properly microdose them.

To learn how to acquire magic mushrooms, check out our article on the Top 4 Ways to Get Magic Mushrooms for Microdosing.

Once you’ve obtained a sufficient amount of psychedelic fungi, you’ll have to learn the best way to prepare magic mushrooms for microdosing. This involves understanding:

• The proper dosages and the desired effects of microdosing
• How to safely store your magic mushrooms, and
• How to process, weigh out, and distribute your stash into microdoses.

This guide contains all the information you need to properly and safely start your magic mushroom microdosing journey.

Disclaimer: Possessing and consuming magic mushrooms is considered illegal in countries where psilocybin is a scheduled substance. We encourage our readers to learn and follow their local regulations. This guide should be used for education and harm reduction purposes only.

What Is a Magic Mushroom Microdose?

First off, the concept of microdosing entails consuming minute doses of psychedelics in order to harness their beneficial effects on focus, creativity, and mood. These doses are known as ‘sub-perceptual,’ meaning that you should not feel the psychoactive effects themselves.

In order to determine your perfect magic mushroom microdosing dose, you will need to do a bit of experimentation. If you have already had full-on magic mushroom trips before, you may already know what your standard effective dose is. Your microdose will then be approximately 1/10 of your recreational dose.

For most people, a magic mushroom microdose will be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5g of dried mushrooms. This will depend on body weight and individual physiology.

The best way to arrive at your perfect microdose is to start with 0.1g and slowly increase it until you start noticing the psychedelic effects. Then, roll back to the previous amount and you will have found your sub-perceptual dose.

Note 1: Some people have very sensitive systems which are conducive to experiencing psychoactive effects already at 0.1g. If you find yourself tripping on this dose, you will need to reduce it further, to 0.08 or 0.07g.

Note 2: If you are using magic truffles instead of mushrooms, you can double these recommended doses due to the truffles’ lower potency.

Use Dried Mushrooms for Microdosing!

Magic mushrooms come in two forms—fresh or dried; the latter is ideal for microdosing because they can be stored indefinitely and because they are easier to pulverize.

If you obtain fresh mushrooms by foraging for them or by getting them from someone who recently harvested, you can easily dry them yourself. This is done by simply spreading them onto paper towels and leaving them out for a day or two.

You can also opt to have a fan blowing over them, or place them out in the sun or in an oven at low heat; these methods will expedite the process to a matter of hours rather than days. Finally, if you have a food dehydrator, you can use that instead.

Storing Your Mushrooms for Microdosing

Dry magic mushrooms can be placed in a zip-lock bag or a mason jar and stored in a cool, dark place for many months.

You can also take some desiccant, roll it in a napkin, put it in a pouch, and tape it to the edge of the bag or jar to suck out the remaining moisture in the mushrooms—this will extend their expiration date to a few years and beyond. It’s important that the mushrooms do not have physical contact with the desiccant. Once they achieve “cracker dryness,” they will be in an ideal state for storing and microdosing.

If you have a vacuum-sealing machine, packing them this way will ensure there will be no oxygenation and extend their shelf life basically indefinitely. However, this is only recommended to do for a larger quantity of mushrooms you want to store for a long time, as it’s not convenient to unpack them each time you are preparing your microdoses.

Preparing the Magic Mushroom Microdoses

Step 1: Grinding

The best way to prepare the dried magic mushrooms for microdosing is by grinding them into a powder and loading them into empty capsules. Magic mushrooms have different levels of psilocybin in their caps and stems, as well as from one mushroom to another, so finely grinding them will homogenize this variance. 

The best tool for the job is a spice or coffee grinder on the ‘pulse’ setting. It takes less than a minute to get a fine magic mushroom powder this way, but be advised that the microscopic particles will be floating around in the chamber for a while after grinding.

For this reason, you should allow the contents to settle before opening the chamber, lest you want your kitchen and breathing apparatus to be on the receiving end of some magical fungal dust.

Note: Unless you plan to store your powder in a vacuum-sealed container, we recommend NOT grinding the entirety of your magic mushroom stash, as the pulverization will maximize the surface of the mushroom flesh exposed to oxygen. Over time, oxygenation will lead to a decrease in potency, so it’s best to only prepare enough powder for up to a week’s worth of microdoses.

Step 2: Measuring

To measure out the minute weights required for microdosing, you will need a precision scale. While for most microdosers scales with a resolution of 0.1g will suffice, some will need to calibrate their doses more finely, so it’s best to opt for a scale with a sensitivity of at least 0.01g.

When measuring out your doses, you can place a paper on the scale and reset it to show 0.0g. You can then simply drop some powder on the paper using a coffee or teaspoon. It’s convenient to measure out several doses at once if you reset the scale again and drop the powder on another place on the scale.

You can then choose whether you’d prefer ingesting your mushroom powder mixed in with your food or beverage or loaded into gel caps. Because the doses are so minute, in either case you should not have problems with the, for some people, unpleasant taste.

Step 3.1: Mixing Into Foods & Beverages

You can add your magic mushroom microdose to any food or drink of your choice: you can drink it with tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or smoothies, or eat it with honey, yogurt, cereals, or in any other way you like.

Note: If you mix your mushroom powder in with a citric liquid such as lemon juice, and leave it to sit for 15-20mins, the cell walls will begin to degrade, releasing active compounds into the solution. This should make the effects come on sooner and possibly be more intense.

Step 3.2: Loading Gel Caps

Loading the powder into gel caps is likely the most convenient way to go about microdosing magic mushrooms–it’s great for storing and taking the microdoses with you for inconspicuous ingestion on the go. If you choose to make your own mushroom pills, the empty gel caps are available from a variety of online and offline vendors.

Capsule filling machines are cheap and allow you to easily fill dozens of capsules in a single go. However, as these machines distribute the contents equally among all capsules, you will need to determine the total amount of powder you can load in one turn first; then, you can compensate the difference between that amount and the weight of your ground mushrooms with a filler powder of your choice.

If you choose to do it manually, you can either do it by simply folding the paper base on which you measured out the dose and pouring the powder into the capsule, or using a tool such as a micro spoon to scoop out the adequate amount from your stash. Micro spoons are also convenient because they can circumvent the need for a precision scale; however, it’s still advised to use a scale in order to have your microdoses be exact and consistent.

The Effects of Microdosing Magic Mushrooms

About an hour or two after ingestion, mushroom microdosers usually report an increase in focus and energy, as well as in openness and empathy.

Many users find that microdosing mushrooms helps them alleviate their depression; some, who take pharmaceuticals, have reported that regular minute doses of psilocybin are useful in weaning off, and even quitting antidepressants.

Because microdosing is a recent phenomenon, science still hasn’t fully scrutinized it. However, a recent survey of 98 microdosers reported significant decreases in measures of depression, stress, and mind wandering (distractibility), and increases in neuroticism (emotional amplitude) and absorption (imaginative thinking).

This study has basically confirmed what the many people benefiting from microdosing have so far reported. However, the results included an almost equal number of those microdosing LSD and psilocybin, so it does not apply exclusively to microdosing mushrooms.

Don’t Overdo It

When microdosing, it’s important to remember that, even though you’re taking sub-threshold amounts of psychedelics, you can still build a tolerance to them.

This is why you are advised to either microdose only on special days when you need that extra boost, or, if you want to do it regularly, to follow a regimen.

Typical microdosing regimens will have you take a dose every three days, so with two day breaks in between doses. The maximal frequency you should microdose with is every second day, for no longer than a few months.

You should take your microdoses in the morning, ideally before 10am, or you may have trouble falling asleep. However, this is individual and depends on your circadian rhythm, age, general body physiology, and daily rhythm, so you should experiment to arrive at your ideal times.

Finally, you should find your ideal dose and stick to it. If you feel like it’s not effective anymore, you should not increase it—it actually likely means you have developed a tolerance, and you should take a few days off.