Your first magic mushroom or truffle trip is a massive day in your life. While all drugs offer insight, nothing compares to the power of psychedelics. And going into it, you want to know what you’re in for. Luckily, with a few precautions, a mushroom trip is likely to be one of the most wonderful experiences of your life.

Preparing for Your Trip

It’s important to prepare properly for a psychedelic trip, especially if you’re not used to tripping. More than with party drugs, your surroundings and the people you’re with will massively affect the quality of a psychedelic experience. As a general rule, a quiet place with one or two close friends is an ideal starting point. The main thing is that you feel safe and comfortable in yourself and your environment. In short, go somewhere you won’t be disturbed, and with friends you don’t mind being a little weird with!

The Best Way To Take Magic Mushrooms (or Truffles)

There are a few different ways to take magic mushrooms and truffles. While each changes elements of the trip a little, there are other factors, such as fasting and dose, that will have a much greater effect on the experience.

Step 1: Determine the Correct Dose

How high you want to get, how big you are, and which strain of mushrooms or truffles you are taking will determine your ideal dose. Ultimately, as you become a more experienced psychonaut, you’ll experiment with different doses to find the right one for you. To start, though, guidance is always handy. This calculator will put you in good stead. If in doubt, start low. It’s always better to wish you’d taken more than wish you’d taken less.

Step 2: Fasting Before Your Trip

As mushrooms and truffles are digested like any other food, the contents of your stomach matters. Taking mushrooms on a full stomach can seriously reduce the effects—to the point of almost entirely nullifying them.

Fasting for 4–6 hours before a trip will make a massive difference to the quality, strength, and purity of your experience. What’s more, as they begin to wear off, eating at the end of a mushroom trip can be a real pleasure.

Step 3: Consume Your Magic Mushrooms Via Your Preferred Method

As briefly touched upon earlier, there are several ways to ingest magic mushrooms. Let's take a look at the 5 most popular methods.

1. Chew Them Up

This is the simplest way to take mushrooms and truffles, dried or fresh. The main drawback is the taste, which many find rather unpleasant. It’s best to chew them up to a pulp, as this makes a big difference in how quickly they’re digested, and how quickly the effects take hold. Depending on a few factors, and your metabolism, it can take around 15 minutes to an hour to come up on mushrooms if you’ve chewed them. And they tend to last for 4–6 hours. If the mushrooms are good, and you’ve taken enough, then you will find the effects are very potent using this method.

2. Grind Them Up and Make Capsules

This is particularly good if you intend to microdose, as you can measure exact amounts and take them easily. It’s also just easier in general, as all you need to do is swallow a capsule, rather than chew monotonously on a mouthful of desiccated fungi. However, if you just plan on the odd trip, grinding them up and adding them into capsules could be more effort than it's worth. The onset and longevity of this method will be the same as eating them.

3. Mix Them With Food

Chocolate imbued with magic mushrooms is becoming more and more popular. To do it properly yourself involves careful extraction, however. Although, you can just mix them with melted chocolate and munch away. Likewise, you can mix them with pesto, top a pizza with them, or stir them into a soup. Really, you can add them to anything you want and make them far more palatable.

Two things to be aware of, though. Subjecting mushrooms to high heat will degrade the psilocybin and inactivate them. Therefore, they should be added to food after it has been cooked. Also, as previously mentioned, taking them with food will reduce their effects. So, if you’re after a full-blown trip, this is not the method for you!

4. Make a Tea

A tea can be a great way to take mushrooms, especially for those who experience stomach discomfort. Often, this discomfort is in response to the chitin in the mushroom cell walls. As mushroom tea extracts the psilocybin, there is no need to consume the actual mushroom. Although, there is no way of knowing how much of the psilocybin has been extracted into the tea, and how much is being left behind in the body of the mushroom.

Another good thing about mushroom tea is that it can be drunk over a period of time, meaning you have more control over the strength of the trip. To aid extraction, you can add lemon to the tea, too.

5. Prepare a Lemon Tek

Some claim that the lemon tek is the ultimate way to take magic mushrooms and magic truffles. It involves covering cut or ground mushrooms in the juice of one or two lemons, letting it sit for twenty minutes, and then downing it as a shot. The citric acid in the lemon converts the psilocybin into psilocin outside of the body. This conversion usually happens in the stomach. The result is that the body is able to uptake it rapidly and effectively.

The jury is out on how effective this method is, but it seems that, when it works, it leads to fast and powerful trips. However, as the body does not need to convert it, it will break it down more readily, shaving an hour or two off the overall length of the trip. Also, if left to sit too long, the psilocin can begin to degrade outside the body, too. If it starts to turn blue, drink it immediately!

Reflecting on Your Experience

It’s likely that your trip will give you insights and experiences you may not have had before. For many, this is why they trip. The world may be full of clichés about thoughtful psychonauts, but disregard these for a moment and ponder on the experiences you’ve had. Sometimes, they really can change your life.