If you’ve spent any time researching microdosing, you’ve run into a wall of “protocols.”

The Fadiman Protocol. The Stamets Stack. The Psychedelic Coaching Institute protocols. Microdosing.org schedules. Reddit’s hundred variations of the above.

They all sound official. They all come with confident charts. And they all give you the impression that microdosing is something with strict rules - and that if you don’t follow the rules correctly, you’ll get it wrong.

Here’s the part nobody tells you: most of those protocols were designed for research, not for your real life.

Let me explain what that means.

What the Fadiman Protocol Actually Is

Dr. James Fadiman is a psychologist who has been researching psychedelics since the 1960s. When microdosing started getting attention again in the 2010s, he became one of the first researchers to systematically collect data from people doing it in everyday life.

To do that research, he needed a structured schedule. Without structure, every person’s data would be impossible to compare to anyone else’s. The schedule he settled on:

• Day 1: Microdose

• Day 2: Off

• Day 3: Off

• Day 4: Repeat

A simple three-day cycle. Clean. Easy to track. Replicable across thousands of people.

That schedule became known as the Fadiman Protocol - and over time, it became the default that everyone refers to.

Here's What Fadiman Himself Has Said

This part matters: Fadiman has been clear, publicly and repeatedly, that this protocol was never meant to be a strict rule.

He designed it as a research tool - something to give him stable, comparable data across his subjects. It was a way to remove variables so the research could actually mean something.

He’s said in interviews that he never intended people to treat the 1-on / 2-off schedule as gospel. It was a structure for the study - not a prescription for everyday users.

But somewhere along the way, the research schedule became the rule. And now you have thousands of people thinking they’re “doing microdosing wrong” if they don’t follow it exactly.

The Other Protocols (Same Story)

The same thing happened with most of the named protocols:

The Stamets Stack

Mycologist Paul Stamets designed his protocol around a 4-day-on, 3-day-off rhythm, paired with Lion’s Mane and niacin. Like Fadiman’s, the schedule was built for trackability and replication.

Psychedelic Coaching Institute / Clinical Protocols

Practitioner-training organizations (like PCI) often publish standardized protocols for their students to use with clients. These exist primarily so that practitioners can deliver consistent, defensible, repeatable programs - important for the business of being a coach, less important for the experience of being a person.

The Internet's Hundred Variations

Every microdosing forum and influencer has their own slight variation. Most of them are someone’s preference dressed up as a system.

Why "Real Life" and "Research Protocol" Aren't the Same Thing

In a research study, you need every subject to follow the same schedule so the data is comparable. That makes sense. You can’t measure microdosing’s effects if everyone is dosing differently - there’s nothing to compare against.

But you are not a research subject.

You have a life. You have rhythms. You have weeks when you need more support and weeks when you don’t. You have days when your body says yes and days when your body says rest. You have travel, illness, periods of intense work, periods of calm. None of which a rigid 1-on / 2-off schedule can adapt to.

The protocols were designed for someone who isn’t quite you and doesn’t have your life.

What I Actually Recommend: The Intuitive Protocol

Here’s what I help my clients build:

Take it as you need it. Take 1–2 days off a week.

That’s the whole protocol.

The off days are non-negotiable (more on why in a moment). Everything else is yours. Some weeks you might take a microdose three days. Some weeks five days. Some weeks every other day. You listen to your body, your nervous system, and your life - and you respond.

This is harder than following a rigid schedule. But it’s also dramatically more effective for most people, because it adjusts to the actual conditions of your real life instead of asking your real life to adjust to a research template.

The Two Rules of the Intuitive Protocol

For this to work, two things have to be true:

1. You take at least 1–2 days off a week.

This is the one universal rule across every protocol that exists, and it’s not arbitrary. The off days are part of the medicine.

• Tolerance. Your body’s response to microdoses dulls if you take them every day without breaks.

• Integration. The off days are when the brain consolidates what’s been opening up. Without them, the medicine has nothing to land into.

• Body wisdom. Rest days teach you what your baseline actually feels like. Without them, you can’t tell what the microdose is contributing.

2. You pay attention.

The intuitive protocol requires self-awareness. You need to notice:

• How you feel on dose days vs. off days

• Whether the dose feels needed or routine

• When your body wants more rest

• Whether a particular week is asking for more support or less

If you’re not willing to pay attention, follow Fadiman. The structure will at least keep you out of the worst pitfalls. But if you are willing to pay attention, the intuitive protocol will serve you better than any pre-written schedule.

The LSD Exception

I want to be honest about one place where structure matters more than intuition: LSD.

LSD builds tolerance fast - within days. If you start taking it more than every-other-day, the receptors downregulate and the microdose stops working. So for LSD specifically, something close to the Fadiman schedule (1 day on / 2 days off) isn’t optional - it’s how the medicine works.

You can still bring intuition to LSD microdosing. Maybe some weeks you dose less than the schedule calls for. Maybe you skip a cycle. But you generally can’t dose more often than the rough 1-on / 2-off rhythm without diminishing returns.

For mushrooms and DMT, the intuitive approach has much more room to breathe.

What Happens Without a Rigid Protocol

People often ask me: “Won’t I just take too much if there’s no schedule?”

In my experience, the opposite is usually what happens. People with the intuitive protocol almost always end up taking less than the Fadiman schedule would have prescribed - because they notice when they don’t need a dose, and they trust themselves to skip it.

The thing that makes microdosing work isn’t the schedule. It’s the practice - paying attention, building self-awareness, treating yourself like the unique person you are.

Why I Care About This

A lot of new microdosers come to me anxious about “doing it right.” They’ve read five blog posts and they’re afraid that if they take a dose on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, they’ve broken something.

You haven’t broken anything. The schedule isn’t sacred. The medicine isn’t fragile. You aren’t fragile.

The point of microdosing was never to follow a chart. The point was to feel like yourself again - and that requires you to be yourself, not a research subject.

I write about this in more depth - the protocol obsession, the gatekeeping around microdosing, and what the medicine actually requires from you - in my book Bitches Be Trippin’.

Let's Build Your Actual Protocol

The free 20-minute consultation is where we figure out your rhythm. We talk about the medicine that fits, the rough structure to start with, and what to pay attention to so you can build the intuitive practice over time.

No pressure. No judgment. No one handing you a research template and calling it a recommendation.

The best protocol is the one that fits you.