The Microdosing Guidebook

C. J. Spotswood is a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner, and The Microdosing Guidebook reads like the handout a thoughtful clinician would give a patient who has already decided to try microdosing and wants to do it responsibly. The first third covers the essentials — what microdosing is and is not, the history from Hofmann and Fadiman to the present, and an honest survey of the research on psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and ketamine that separates what has been shown in trials from what is still anecdote. The tone is careful and clinical without being cold.

The remainder of the book is where it earns its title. Spotswood walks the reader step by step through preparation: screening for contraindications and medication interactions, choosing a protocol, setting a baseline, defining an intention, and deciding what to measure. Then come the worksheets — daily and weekly journal pages, mood and sleep trackers, prompts for reflecting on off-days — designed to be filled in over a full cycle. A chapter on integration explains how to review those notes at the end and decide whether to continue, adjust or stop. The limitation is that the workbook format assumes a printed copy; the research summaries are also brief compared with Fadiman or Nutt, and the book was written before the most recent placebo-controlled microdosing studies.

For MicrodosingDiary users this is almost a paper twin of the app. The daily prompts Spotswood suggests — dose, time, mood, sleep, energy, notable events — map directly onto the fields in a diary entry, and his insistence on establishing a baseline before the first dose is advice we repeat constantly. Readers who prefer a structured, checklist-driven approach and want a clinician's framing of safety will find it more useful than any memoir.