30 Days of Microdosing Magic Truffles: Part 3 - The Dependency Question

Week 3: Testing the Foundation

If Week 1 was curiosity and Week 2 was confirmation, Week 3 was confrontation. Not with the truffles—with myself.

I ended the last update with a concern that had been growing quietly at the edges of my experience: am I becoming psychologically dependent on dose days? The focus, the flow, the friction-free thinking—these were genuinely improving my work output and my evenings. But I'd also caught myself, more than once, mentally counting the days until my next dose. That's a pattern worth examining honestly, not explaining away.

Week 3 also brought a practical reality check. The Productivity Microdosing Pack contains six individually sealed 1g portions. On the Fadiman Protocol, that's roughly three weeks of dosing. Doses five and six would land this week. After that, I'd need to decide whether to buy another pack or—more interestingly—see what happened when I stopped.

But first, the week itself.

Day 15 (Monday) - Dose Day: The Routine Sharpens

7:35 AM

Fifth dose. The ritual was automatic by now. Fridge, counter, coffee, chew, water. I barely noticed the taste anymore. It had become as unremarkable as my morning vitamins—just another step in the startup sequence.

That bothered me slightly. When something becomes routine, you stop paying attention. And this entire experiment was built on paying attention.

So I forced myself to slow down. I sat at the kitchen table and actually tasted the truffle instead of chewing through it on autopilot. Earthy. A faint sweetness underneath the bitterness that I hadn't noticed before, or maybe hadn't let myself notice. I set an intention: today I'm observing my relationship to the dose, not just the dose's effects.

9:15 AM - The Familiar Lift

By now, I could almost set my watch by it. Ninety minutes after dosing, that subtle shift. The mental static fading. The world coming into slightly sharper resolution. Not visually—perceptually. Like my brain was running fewer background processes and could allocate more resources to whatever was in front of me.

I was writing a long-form guide on autoflowering cannabis genetics for the blog. Dense material requiring me to synthesise breeder data, growing reports, and our own product specs into something a hobbyist grower would find genuinely useful. On a normal Monday, I'd outline the piece and maybe get through the introduction and first section.

Today, I wrote 1,800 words before lunch. Not rushed, filler-laden words either. Clean, structured prose that barely needed editing when I re-read it later. The connective tissue between sections—the transitions that usually take me the longest—just appeared as I wrote. Like the article already existed somewhere and I was just transcribing it.

12:00 PM - A Conversation Worth Noting

Over lunch, a colleague mentioned he'd been considering microdosing himself. He knew about my experiment—I hadn't been secretive about it—and wanted to know if I'd recommend it.

I surprised myself with my answer. "I'd recommend doing the research first," I told him. "Not the truffle. The self-awareness work. If you don't know what your baseline looks like, you can't measure what changes."

That advice came from somewhere genuine, not from a script. Three weeks ago, I would have enthusiastically said "yes, absolutely, try it." But the experiment had made me more careful about distinguishing between cause and effect. The truffle was part of the equation. So was better sleep, more structured work habits, daily journaling, and the simple act of paying attention to my own mental state for the first time in years.

He asked whether it felt like a drug. I thought about it. "It feels like taking off a heavy backpack you forgot you were wearing. You don't feel high. You just feel less burdened."

He seemed to like that answer. I'm not sure it was accurate. But it was honest.

3:30 PM - Productivity Data

I'd been loosely tracking my output since Day 1. Not with fancy tools—just a note at the end of each workday estimating how many "deep work blocks" I completed. A deep work block, by my definition, was 45+ minutes of focused work on a single task without checking my phone, opening a new tab, or context-switching.

The numbers through Week 3 were revealing:

Pre-experiment baseline (estimated from memory): 2–3 blocks per day.

Week 1 dose days: 4–5 blocks. Off days: 2–3 blocks.

Week 2 dose days: 5–6 blocks. Off days: 3–4 blocks.

Today (Day 15): 6 blocks by 3:30 PM, with energy left for more.

The dose day numbers were climbing. But more importantly, so were the off day numbers. My baseline was lifting. Whether that was neuroplasticity, better habits, or both—the trend was clear.

7:00 PM - The Dependency Check

Evening. Dinner with my partner. I told her about my lunch conversation and the "heavy backpack" metaphor. She gave me a look—the one that means she's about to say something I need to hear.

"That's a good metaphor," she said. "But what happens when the backpack goes back on? Are you okay with that?"

I didn't have a good answer. And that, more than any productivity metric, was the most important data point of the day.

Day 16 (Tuesday) - Off Day: The Afterglow Holds

The afterglow effect I'd noticed in Week 2 was still present. Day-after-dose Tuesdays were becoming my second-best workday of the week, which was a strange thing to write about a day that historically ranked near the bottom.

I spent the morning on a technical task: migrating a batch of product URLs after a category restructure. This is pure attention-to-detail work. Redirect maps, 301 chains, canonical updates. The kind of task where one typo creates an SEO problem that takes weeks to diagnose.

I made zero errors. Caught them all in my own QA pass before pushing live. On a pre-experiment Tuesday, I'd typically find one or two mistakes during review that I'd need to fix. Small ones, but still—the difference in precision was notable.

By afternoon, the sharpness had softened. Not disappeared, but the effort required for focus was creeping back up. I found myself getting mildly annoyed at a Slack thread that was spiralling into one of those discussions that should have been a five-minute decision but had somehow become a twelve-message debate about naming conventions.

Old me would have fired off a blunt reply. Today's me closed the thread and went for a ten-minute walk instead. When I came back, someone else had resolved it. Patience as strategy. I was learning that one slowly.

Day 17 (Wednesday) - Off Day: The Dip Returns

Two days after dosing. The familiar dip.

I want to be precise about what "the dip" actually feels like, because I've been describing it in comparative terms—"worse than dose days," "back to baseline"—without really capturing the texture of it.

It's not bad. It's not depression or lethargy or brain fog in the clinical sense. It's more like... friction. Everything is slightly harder than it needs to be. Opening a document takes a small act of willpower. Starting a paragraph requires a running start. Switching from one task to another involves a buffer period where my brain is still chewing on the previous thing while reluctantly loading the next one.

Before the experiment, this was just how work felt. I assumed everyone operated with this level of mental friction and powered through it with caffeine and deadlines. Now, having experienced the alternative, I could feel the friction acutely. And I wasn't sure whether that heightened awareness was a gift or a curse.

Wednesday's work was fine. I wrote meta descriptions for a batch of product pages, reviewed a freelancer's article on CBD extraction methods, and joined a video call about Q2 content planning. All perfectly adequate. None of it inspired.

The question my partner had asked on Monday night kept circling: what happens when the backpack goes back on?

Day 18 (Thursday) - Dose Day: The Last Scheduled Dose

7:45 AM

Sixth and final dose from the Productivity Pack. I held the sealed portion for a moment before opening it. This was the last one. After today, the Fadiman Protocol would run out, and I'd have a decision to make.

I chewed it more deliberately than usual. Paid attention. Earthy. Bitter. Faintly sweet. Then coffee, then my desk.

9:30 AM - Working Through Complexity

The morning task was one I'd been avoiding: a full competitive analysis of three rival seed banks' content strategies. This meant systematically reviewing their blog output, keyword targeting, backlink profiles, and content gaps relative to ours. It's the kind of work that requires holding multiple frameworks in your head simultaneously while making judgment calls about strategic priority.

Pre-experiment, I would have broken this into three or four separate sessions across multiple days, because trying to do it in one sitting would leave me mentally exhausted and sloppy by the third competitor.

Today, I did all three in a single morning session. Not because I was rushing—because the mental scaffolding held. I could keep Competitor A's patterns in working memory while analysing Competitor B, spotting overlaps and gaps as I went rather than having to go back and cross-reference later. It was like having a larger whiteboard in my head.

The output was a strategy document I was genuinely proud of. Not "good for a Thursday morning" proud. Actually proud. The kind of work I'd want to show someone.

1:00 PM - An Unplanned Experiment

Something unexpected happened after lunch. I got a call from a supplier about a shipment issue—wrong quantities on a truffle order (ironic, given the context). The call was tense. The supplier was defensive, I needed to be firm without burning the relationship, and the financial stake was significant enough that I couldn't just let it slide.

Pre-experiment, a call like this would have spiked my cortisol and wrecked my afternoon. I would have felt the stress lingering for hours, replaying the conversation, second-guessing my tone, catastrophising about the business impact.

Today, I handled the call cleanly. Firm but calm. I stated the problem, proposed a resolution, held my ground when he pushed back, and agreed on next steps. When I hung up, I felt... fine. Not triumphant, not drained. Just done. The stress didn't stick. I went back to my competitive analysis document and picked up exactly where I'd left off.

This wasn't about focus or productivity. This was emotional regulation. And it was the single most convincing effect I'd experienced in three weeks. Not because it was dramatic, but because stressful interruptions are where I usually lose the most time. Not from the interruption itself, but from the emotional residue that contaminates everything that follows.

If microdosing did nothing except improve my stress recovery time, it would still be worth it for that alone.

5:30 PM - Taking Stock

Last dose day of the original pack. I sat with that fact for a few minutes before shutting down my laptop.

Three weeks. Six doses. Zero negative side effects. Measurable improvements in focus, creative problem-solving, and emotional regulation. Rising baseline performance even on off days. Better sleep. Better conversations. Better work.

But also: a subtle but real anticipation for dose days. A slight deflation on Day 3 of each cycle. An awareness that I'd been measuring my weeks in terms of "dose" and "not dose."

That wasn't nothing.

Day 19 (Friday) - Off Day: Post-Dose Clarity

Strong afterglow day. I'd come to expect this now—Fridays after Thursday doses were reliably good. I spent the morning writing a newsletter draft about spring planting schedules and seasonal strain availability. The writing came easily, though not with the almost effortless flow of a dose day. Call it 80% of peak. More than enough for solid output.

The afternoon brought an interesting test. A colleague sent me a draft blog post to review—a piece about the legal landscape of psilocybin across Europe. Given my experiment, I had strong opinions about the topic. The old me would have rewritten half the article to match my perspective. Today, I gave targeted feedback. Kept my ego out of it. Focused on what would make the piece better for the reader, not what would make it sound more like me.

Small thing. But these small shifts in how I interacted with people and with my own impulses had been accumulating all month. I wasn't a different person. I was a less cluttered version of the same person.

Day 20 (Saturday) - Off Day

Normal Saturday. Groceries, cooking, a long walk through the neighbourhood. I checked the SOL chart briefly—force of habit—and noticed I was less emotionally reactive to price movements than I used to be. A 4% dip that would have tightened my chest a month ago barely registered. I noted it, checked my stop-loss levels, closed the app.

My partner and I had dinner at a place in town. Conversation flowed easily. She said I'd been "more present" the past few weeks. Not just at dinner—in general. Less distracted. Less in my own head. She asked whether I planned to continue after the pack ran out.

"I don't know yet," I said. "That's actually what I'm most interested in finding out."

Day 21 (Sunday) - Reflection: The Honest Assessment

Week 3 journal entry. The big one.

What Improved:

Dose day productivity continued to climb—six deep work blocks became the norm, not the exception. The emotional regulation effect on Day 18 was the most significant single observation of the entire experiment so far. Off-day baseline performance continued rising, suggesting cumulative benefits beyond the immediate chemical effect. Interpersonal patience and presence remained improved throughout the week. Sleep quality stayed strong. Zero negative side effects across all three weeks.

What Concerned Me:

The psychological attachment to dose days was real. Not severe, not consuming—but present. I noticed a subtle emotional difference between waking up on a dose day versus an off day. Not dread on off days, but a slight flatness. Like knowing today would be good-but-not-great. The Day 3 dip (two days post-dose) remained the weakest point in the cycle and hadn't improved as much as other off days.

The Dependency Question—Answered (Partially):

Here's where I landed after three weeks of honest observation: the truffles created a reference experience. They showed my brain what focused, clear-headed, emotionally regulated work felt like. Some of that reference experience was carrying over into off days—my rising baseline proved it. But some of it wasn't. The dose days were still noticeably better.

Was I dependent? Not in the way that word usually implies. I could function perfectly well without the microdose. My off days were better than my pre-experiment days. I wasn't suffering withdrawals or cravings in any physical sense.

But I'd developed a preference. And preferences, left unchecked, can quietly become needs.

The Decision:

The original pack was finished. Week 4 would be the real experiment: a full week without dosing, to see what my new baseline actually looked like without chemical support. Could I maintain the habits, the focus strategies, the emotional regulation patterns I'd built? Or would they gradually erode without the truffle's scaffolding?

I ordered a second Productivity Pack, not to use immediately—but to have on hand. If Week 4 went well, it would stay sealed. If my baseline collapsed, I'd have the option to resume and try a longer taper.

Either way, Week 4 would tell me what I actually needed to know: how much of this was the truffle, and how much was me.

To be continued in Part 4: Week 4 - The Baseline Test

Note: This content describes personal experiences with legally obtained psilocybin truffles in the Netherlands. This is not medical advice. Psilocybin is illegal in many countries. Consult with a healthcare professional before trying microdosing.