Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance

James Fadiman gave microdosing its modern vocabulary and its best-known schedule — one day on, two days off — in The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide back in 2011. This 2025 book, co-written with Jordan Gruber, is what he learned in the fourteen years that followed. Since the first edition, Fadiman has collected thousands of detailed reports from people around the world who microdosed psilocybin or LSD and wrote to him about what happened. Those reports, cross-referenced with the growing body of survey and laboratory research, form the backbone of the book.

The structure is refreshingly practical. Rather than one long argument, the authors work through hundreds of concrete questions: how to find your own threshold dose, why some people feel nothing on day one and too much on day three, what to do about sleep, how microdosing interacts with SSRIs and other medications, when to stop, and how to tell placebo from effect. Separate chapters cover depression, ADHD, chronic pain, long COVID, menopause, tapering off pharmaceuticals, athletic and creative performance, and dozens of other specific concerns. Fadiman is careful to mark where the evidence is anecdotal and where controlled studies exist, and he does not shy away from reports of people who found no benefit or who felt worse.

For MicrodosingDiary users this is as close to a reference manual as the field currently has. The emphasis on keeping notes, adjusting dose slowly, and comparing on-days with off-days is exactly the workflow this app is built around, and the book explains the reasoning behind each step. Its main limitation is the one every honest microdosing book shares: much of the evidence is self-reported, and the authors say so plainly. Read it as the accumulated experience of the person who has listened to more microdosers than anyone else alive, not as a clinical textbook.