The Last Variable — A Neural Farmer's Story
A composite account drawn from community testimonials. On the person who optimized everything else and discovered the hardware itself was the variable they hadn't been able to touch.
Note: This is a composite account, drawn from patterns in community testimonials and rewritten in the Movement’s voice. The experience described reflects real patterns we’ve heard many times, but the “I” in the story is a composite — not a single individual. Real submitted stories will replace pieces like this as the community grows. If you want to share your own, the submission form is here.
I keep a spreadsheet. Obviously.
Sleep score, HRV, morning glucose, resting heart rate, VO2 max, macro split, training load, and a column where I rate my own focus on a one-to-five scale at 11am and 3pm. I’ve been keeping some version of this spreadsheet since 2019. I can tell you what my average HRV was the first week of September 2022. I have opinions about whether you should train fasted. I am, in other words, the person the optimization community talks about when they talk about optimization.
And the thing I want to say is that by the time I started looking at microdosing, I had already dialed in most of what can be dialed in. The sleep was dialed. The training was dialed. The diet was dialed. I had done six months of Lion’s Mane alone as a baseline. I had done another six months of a proper Stamets Stack with a friend who could get the ingredients. What I learned from those was that the stack is real — the cognitive effects aren’t subtle for me, at least — but that the stack was the surface of the thing.
The thing underneath it was something I hadn’t expected and didn’t have a metric for. The best way I can describe it is a softening of the urgency. Not a softening of the discipline — the discipline is still there, the spreadsheet is still there — but a change in the relationship between me and the spreadsheet. I used to check the numbers and feel them as an indictment. Now I check the numbers and feel them as information. That sounds small. It’s not small. It’s the difference between running a protocol from fear and running a protocol from curiosity. Fear is expensive. Curiosity is cheap.
The spreadsheet still has the same columns. The numbers are better than they were a year ago, but not dramatically so — the diminishing returns on optimization are real. What’s different is that I spend less of my mental energy on the numbers and more of it on the things the numbers were supposed to support. I have a better relationship with my partner now than I did when I was dialed to a seven. I’m doing better work at my actual job. I take walks. The walks are not in the spreadsheet.
A thing I didn’t expect: the practice made me less interested in my own metrics and more interested in other people’s experiences. I spent twenty minutes yesterday reading a paper on indigenous ceremonial use of psilocybin in Oaxaca — not because it’s relevant to my optimization, but because it felt like there was something in the history I had been missing. I don’t think I would have read it a year ago. I would have closed the tab because it wasn’t in my workflow.
What I would tell someone at the front end of this, specifically from the Neural Farmer side: the stack is real. The protocol is real. The numbers will probably go in the direction you want them to go. But stay open to the possibility that the most useful thing the medicine shows you is the question of what you were trying to optimize for. The answer is rarely on the spreadsheet. And the version of you that can finally see that is the version of you the optimizing was trying to build in the first place.
This story is a composite. If you’re a Neural Farmer and you want to share your own version, submit it here. We’ll never publish anything without your approval.
Read the Neural Farmer guide →
The Microdose Movement is an educational community, not a medical provider. Nothing in these stories is medical advice. Individual experiences vary widely, and what worked for one person may not work for another.