Journaling, editing, reflecting, integrating – all remain valid when formalising your anecdotal report, to make sense of everything you experienced during your protocol.
But, what if the quality of your microdosing experience, and the way you report it, depended, on the quality of the questions you asked during it?
We often want experiences or perspectives to be definitive, and for outcomes or understandings to be neatly categorised and then calculated, like math:
How do I feel?
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. But it doesn’t give us very much.
I feel good.
I feel calm.
I feel different.
Nothing much happened.
These are conclusions. But, what they don’t tell us is the finer details of what happened within the experience.
This is where phenomenological inquiry becomes interesting.
Phenomenology: improving the resolution of self-enquiry
Phenomenology is concerned with lived experience: how something actually appears and is experienced from the first-person point of view. So, instead of rushing to explain an experience, evaluate it or turn it into a story, we become curious about what is actually there.
What am I noticing?
Where am I noticing it?
What has changed?
What hasn’t?
What is happening in my body, my attention, my senses, my perception of myself and my relationship with the world around me?
Phenomenology gives us a way of increasing the resolution of our self-enquiry.
Compare:
How do you feel? “I feel calm.”
With:
What sensations can you notice inside your body right now, and where exactly do you feel them?
(Interoception)
What are you noticing through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch right now? Has anything changed?
(Exteroception)
Without looking, what can you notice about the position, movement and weight of your body?
(Proprioception)
And we don’t have to stop with the senses.
Where is your attention going?
How quickly are thoughts appearing?
Does time feel different?
How are you relating to other people?
Has your emotional tone shifted?
Has anything changed in the way you experience yourself?
Phenomenology can explore perception, thought, emotion, attention, bodily awareness, embodied action, our experience of time, the self and our relationship with other people.
Suddenly, “I felt calm today” has the potential to become a much richer record of lived experience.
And imagine doing that not once, but throughout an entire protocol.
It can lead to an important shift, whereby ‘attention’ becomes part of the method, simply by asking better questions.
Why? Because you start to train your attention, shifting it away from a narrow focus to something much broader, more expansive.
Repeatedly directing attention towards dimensions of experience we normally overlook can make us more attentive to subtleties that might otherwise disappear beneath a simple judgement of good, bad, better or nothing happened.
The questions don’t simply give us more to write in our journal. They change what we pay attention to. And that makes the attentional practice itself part of the journey.
As you begin building a detailed record of lived experience over time you bring some of the methodological discipline we value in good research into personal self-enquiry, with more systematic observation, more precise description and a clearer distinction between what you experienced and what you think it means.
For citizen science, that matters. Because anecdotal reports are going to exist anyway, so the question is:
How good can we make them?
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Where are you now on your own journey?
Are you ready to help others?
Our facilitator program starts on November 15th 2026 so if you feel ready to become a skilled facilitator — someone capable of guiding and coaching others through their microdosing journey — why not join our next cohort. Here are some of the highlights:
- Train alongside a network of peers from around the world
- Work with real clients before you graduate
- Develop practical frameworks for facilitation and self-enquiry
- Take part in 12 masterclasses, including one with pioneering microdosing researcher and author Dr James Fadiman