A Year on Threshold

Note: This account was submitted by a Sacred Cybin customer. Names have been changed and identifying details altered at their request. This is not a medical testimonial and should not be read as evidence of medical efficacy. Individual results vary.

I did not come to microdosing dramatically. There was no crisis, no rock bottom, no moment of revelation. I came to it the way most people come to things that eventually matter to them: slowly, reluctantly, and only after exhausting the alternatives I was more comfortable with.

I am fifty-one. I have a small business, a marriage of twenty-three years, two adult children, and a history of what my GP politely called dysthymia, which is a clinical word for the low-grade, persistent kind of depression that is easy to function through and hard to shake. I had tried three different SSRIs over the course of my forties. Each one helped for a while, then stopped helping, or the side effects became the problem I was managing instead of the depression.

I read Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind in 2019 and set it down convinced that none of it applied to me. I was not interested in a trip. I was not interested in retreats or ceremonies or anything that required me to take a day off from being a functioning adult.

Three years later I read it again. Something had changed, or I had, and this time I landed on the microdosing chapters and sat with them for a long time.

Starting with Threshold

I ordered Threshold, 50 mg, because it was the smallest thing available and I wanted to be cautious about being cautious. I read the Microdosing Guide twice. I chose the Fadiman Protocol because the every-other-day rhythm felt more manageable than the Stamets Stack's four consecutive days.

The first dose was a Saturday morning in February. I took it with breakfast and then went about my day, which mostly involved doing taxes. I noticed nothing. This was both a relief and a mild disappointment.

By the end of the first week I had noticed something that I would not have described as an effect at the time. My mornings were slightly less effortful. The particular quality of waking up that I had grown so accustomed to, that gray, reluctant resistance to the day, was a little lighter. Not gone. Lighter.

I wrote one line in my journal each day. This was the practice the Microdosing Guide recommended, and I am not a journaler by nature, so it felt like a small indignity that I was grateful for later. Looking back at those first two weeks, the recurring word in my notes is easier. Not better. Easier.

The middle months

By month three I had run two full four-week cycles with two week breaks in between and I was becoming cautiously convinced that something real was happening. My work was going better, which I could attribute to many things, but the quality of my attention felt different. Less brittle. Less prone to the sudden narrowing that used to happen when things went wrong.

My husband noticed before I did that I was more present at dinner. I asked him what he meant and he said I was not always somewhere else. That is a sentence I have thought about many times since.

I stayed on Threshold for the full year. I never moved up to Daily. My instinct was that the gentlest dose was doing the work I needed it to do, and there was something in the practice of not escalating that felt important. The medicine was teaching me something about sufficiency.

The two week breaks

The breaks between cycles surprised me the most. I expected to miss the microdose, or to notice a return of the dysthymia. What I noticed instead was that the breaks were where I did the most learning. The patterns the medicine had made visible during the cycle became available for examination during the rest period. I started sleeping better during the breaks. My dreams changed.

A therapist friend who knows what I was doing called this integration, the technical term for the work that happens between doses and after cycles. I did not fully understand what she meant until I experienced it. The medicine opens a door. The break is when you stand in the room and look around.

What I would say to someone considering it

Threshold is the right place to start if you are skeptical, cautious, or simply not sure. It is not dramatic. It will not solve your life. It will, for many people, make the life you already have a little easier to inhabit.

I am not off my medication. I am on a lower dose, by choice and under my GP's supervision, after a conversation I never thought I would be able to have. I still have bad days. What I have less of is the gray months that used to connect the bad days into something that felt permanent.

A year on Threshold taught me something I had been trying to learn for decades: that the medicine is not the practice. It is a companion to the practice. The practice is the attention.