This is a guest blog post from Sam Becht, the co-founder of Deliqs, a digital ecosystem for psychedelic care.
What if you can measure your ability to stay calm on stressful days? What if you can monitor your level of wellbeing while having a difficult emotional week? I believe it would empower you to take action. But before we can take action on insights, we need to gather those insights. Microdose tracking is a powerful way to observe and gather insights during your microdosing journey.
When we talk about microdosing with our friends or family, it’s almost always a conversation about the obvious things like: “Cool! What are you taking?”, “Did it work for you?” or “Where can I get some?”. And that’s totally fine. In this post we’re diving a little deeper though; We’ll focus on how to gain insights from your microdosing journey and why it’s so relevant – We’re going to dig deep into microdosing tracking and why it might be the most important step you’re missing in your journey.
I like to think of tracking as a way to gather information that can provide a meaningful picture of how you’re living your life. In most cases, this information can be simplified by categorizing it into separate variables and assigning a score to that variable.
That score, in the form of a number, is convenient because it can then easily be converted into graphs or tables so that changes or progress over time can be visualized. These visualizations can deliver a very insightful look at various areas of your life, which can then become a strong catalyst for change.
Moving forward with this definition of tracking, it is clear that tracking is different from journaling. It is possible to journal without tracking progress or changes.
While microdose tracking can help visualize progress, journaling helps us to make a conscious effort to reflect on our day. Journaling can be highly therapeutic simply by providing an outlet for writing it off: an expressed emotion is a sinking emotion. While journaling and microdose tracking may serve different purposes, it does not mean that we shouldn’t use both tools! In fact, the combo can be synergistic, allowing you to make the most of your microdose process.
4 Reasons to Try Microdose Tracking
1. Microdose tracking helps prepare you for your journey
Tracking is a valuable tool for preparing for a microdosing journey for several reasons:
- Before you even begin microdosing, thinking about what you will be tracking provides a reminder of the importance of setting an intention
- Microdose tracking provides a baseline when comparing your wellbeing, mental state or other variables before, during and after following a microdosing protocol
- It is a great tool for determining your optimal dosage
Setting an Intention: Before we discuss the importance of setting an intention I want to get something out of the way: goal setting and intention setting are not the same. When we talk about a goal, we’re often referring to a desired outcome we want to achieve somewhere in the future. An intention, however, is a theme chosen to create alignment in your life – it doesn’t necessarily imply a specific outcome.
For this reason, intention setting provides a great guidepost when microdosing. Before beginning a microdosing journey, you may not fully know what outcomes you are working towards. You can, however, choose an intention that can guide you towards creating more alignment in your life.
When you set a goal and say: “This month I want to meditate for 15 hours,” it is very specific, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But do you need to microdose to accomplish this goal?
Now consider setting an intention in the same spirit and saying: “For this journey, I want to delve deeper into who I am as a spiritual being”. It allows for you to meditate, spend more time in nature, be understanding towards your parents or just to feel more connected and present. With an intention, there is no right or wrong, no pass or fail.
Yet, your intention still provides direction, and still, you can measure your journey as a spiritual being.
Setting a baseline: There are two other good reasons microdose tracking is important for preparation. Setting a baseline is one of them. When setting a baseline, you find a point in time before you start microdosing to develop a sense of your current state. By comparing your baseline to your state after a microdosing protocol, you can better determine to which extent the journey has impacted you and if your actions have brought your intention to life.
Determine the best dose: Last but not least, microdose tracking helps you to find a dose that suits you well when preparing for a protocol. It’s usually good to test a (very) low dose first, and gradually increase your dosage up to the point where you find your sweet spot. Your sweet spot is the highest dose at which you do not experience any adverse effects (hallucinations, irritability, etc.), and feel able to have a normal functioning day. If you reflect on your days and track the dose intensity at the end of your dosing days, you’ll have a great guide that helps you determine your sweet spot.
Okay, enough preparation. Let’s start dosing.
2. Microdose tracking as a tool to keep you on your toes
What do I mean by that? For starters, tracking your journey can serve as a daily commitment to reflect on your day. Microdose tracking serves as a commitment.
By tracking your wellbeing, mental state, or other variables, you empower yourself to be conscious and take a moment to pause. More often than not, we just go through our days without actually thinking about how that day was. Days can seem to be passing by fast and we miss a lot of opportunities to learn about ourselves and how we react to situations, others, and primarily our own somatic sensations and emotions.
Microdose tracking also presents an opportunity to be conscious about the way you consume psychedelics. It can be tempting to take a microdose and expect a medicinal effect without having to put in the work ourselves. Personally, I don’t believe in framing psychedelics as medicine, because of what it implies: If I ingest this, I will get better. Nothing is further from the truth.
Instead, I view psychedelics as a catalyst for change. They present a window of opportunity to bring about new perspectives from which new habits and a healthier identity follow. When you consciously track your journey, and continuously track the way that a psychedelic catalyst affects you, there is a more active connection between the ingestion of the psychedelic and its effects. In turn, you can use these insights to steer the work that we need to do to develop further.
3. Microdose tracking helps you identify gradual change
What happens to a frog in a slow boiling pot? The frog stays in because of the gradual change in temperature, and eventually dies. Sad story, yes, yet insightful.
This illustrates that gradual change is difficult to see. Those among us with children will recognize, that in hindsight, our youngsters grew up much faster than we realized. We simply don’t see it as it happens because they’re so close by. We experience myopia.
Changing for the better is no different. Not everyone experiences sudden epiphanies while microdosing. Personal development is often gradual in nature, making it challenging to observe changes in the short term.
Microdose tracking is an amazing tool to observe the gradual changes that happen during a microdose journey. Being able to observe these gradual changes can provide motivation to keep developing yourself and can help you feel confident that you can change.
4. Microdose tracking as a tool to take action
I won’t waste too many words on this because I’ve discussed it’s importance already – simply put, you can’t take action on an insight you don’t have.
Microdose tracking helps you gain insights about yourself and understand your microdosing process. These insights can provide a catalyst taking action in your daily life for sustained benefits and long-term change.
As you probably realize by now, I’m a big fan of microdose tracking. But how do we track it?
Microdose Tracking: How to do it
Use an app to track your journey
There are many ways you can track your progress while microdosing. You can do it with a pen and paper, in an excel spreadsheet, or – my preference – in an app on your phone. Why? Because it’s convenient:
- Most of us always have our phone on us
- Allows you to track your state of mind whenever you want to check in
- Predefined questions and answers make it faster to track
- Reminders make sure you don’t forget to check in
- Your progress is visualized and delivered to you in an easy to digest format
Meet The Dose App
What started out as a personal project quickly got out of hand, resulting in the creation of the most convenient microdose tracking method ever. The Dose App by Deliqs has everything you need for a successful microdose journey. With the Dose App, you can:
- Set an intention
- Choose a protocol
- Set a baseline
- Set reminders
But most importantly, it feeds you back the data you generate in easy-to-read graphs so you can see your progress visually.
Learn More About Microdose Tracking
Want to learn more about microdose tracking, and about the Dose app? Join Deliqs co-founder, Sam Becht and Microdosing Institute for a free webinar on microdose tracking on Thursday, July 7 at 12:00 PM EST / 18:00 CEST by signing up here.
About the Author: Sam is one of the Founders at Deliqs, a digital ecosystem for psychedelic care. Psychedelics now play an increasingly important role in the mental health space, and Deliqs aims to ensure that this runs smoothly by creating software that facilitates the responsible use of psychedelics.
