Six Months of Microdosing: A Careful Personal Experiment

I'm a data person by profession — I work in research methodology. When I decided to try microdosing for my moderate, treatment-resistant depression, I treated it like a study. Here's what I tracked and what I found.

I kept a daily mood log using a 1–10 scale for overall mood, 1–10 for anxiety, 1–10 for motivation/energy, and a brief qualitative note. I tracked sleep quality. I tracked whether I'd exercised, socialized, worked productively. I noted the dose days and the off days without exception.

First three months (on 50mg sertraline): The effects were minimal. I could feel something subtle on dose days — a slight warmth, maybe 15 minutes of improved focus in the morning — but my mood scores didn't budge meaningfully from baseline. My mean mood was 5.2 on dose days vs. 5.0 on off days. Not significant.

I'd read that SSRIs blunt psilocybin effects. I discussed with my psychiatrist. We agreed on a supervised taper — 6 weeks down to discontinuation, with close monitoring.

Second three months (off SSRI, microdosing continuing): The first two weeks off sertraline were rough — irritability, some brain zaps, disrupted sleep. By week three, I started to stabilize. By week four, I noticed the microdose days felt different.

Mean mood score over months 4–6: 6.4 on dose days, 6.1 on non-dose days. More importantly, the qualitative notes changed: more instances of "felt connected to work," "handled conflict well," "noticed beauty in small things." Less: "flat," "going through the motions," "couldn't care."

I can't fully separate the effects of stopping sertraline from the effects of microdosing. Discontinuing SSRIs can itself produce mood changes. But the effect timing suggests both were contributing — the improvement started before sertraline should have been fully cleared.

At six months, I decided to take a break. The naturalistic experiment was over. My conclusion: microdosing under SSRI coverage does very little for me. Without SSRI coverage, with the Fadiman protocol, the effect is real but modest — a consistent slight elevation that took several months of tracking to clearly see above the noise of daily life.