Millennials Microdose for Work Focus as BESTIES PTO Leads Sales

At BESTIES, a functional mushroom brand, the best-selling product is called PTO. Co-founder Tess Finkle named the line after the workday on purpose. Job Interview is the mildest tablet. Work From Home sits in the middle, built for the Zoom call where you are dressed from the waist up. PTO is “the weekend one,” she said, the dose for being fully unplugged. Customers could have picked the product built for focus. Most of them picked the one named for time off.

That detail says more about millennial work than most productivity surveys. A generation sold hustle as an identity is now managing the workday in small doses and naming the doses after the job. Call it the dosed workday. It is moving from festival culture into the calendar invite faster than employers, regulators, or researchers can keep up.

A Private Fix Goes Retail

The numbers are no longer niche. An estimated 10 million U.S. adults microdosed psilocybin, LSD or MDMA in 2025, according to a nationally representative RAND survey of 10,000 adults. About 11 million used psilocybin in the past year, and roughly two-thirds of them microdosed at least once.

Finkle, 42, came to it the way many people her age do, through a crisis that started at work. In 2023 she was coming out of a divorce, had spent the pandemic keeping her entertainment PR firm Metro alive, and watched the dual Hollywood strikes put the business at risk again. She told me she and her business partner discussed whether she should step away from leading the company. She ruled out options with heavy side effects before landing on microdosing.

“I was assured that microdoses would keep me functional on an executive level,” she said.

Functional on an executive level is the whole pitch of this category. BESTIES soft-launched in January, officially launched in April, and now sells in shops across 12 states while shipping to nearly all 50, according to Finkle. Its tablets are “psilocybin-inspired” and contain no psilocybin or psilocin. She and co-founder Billy Alcott drew that line so the brand could live in wellness and lifestyle retail rather than smoke shops.

Relief Is the Product

The timing tracks with a bigger shift. Only 54% of U.S. adults now say they drink alcohol, matching last year’s record low, and just 50% of adults 18 to 34 do, per Gallup. The after-work drink is losing its grip, and something is filling the space where decompression used to live. Finkle reads her own sales the same way.

“People are dealing with the acute shifts and dips of the human experience,” she said, “so they are turning to anything that will make them feel better.”

Lemar Stokes, a Marine Corps veteran in Dallas, found BESTIES through Finkle. Since leaving the service he has climbed cell towers, explored cannabis ownership, and started his own mushroom business, House of Myco, while pursuing home inspection and drone work. “Back then, there was a mission, a timeline, and a clear chain of command,” he told me by email. “Now, I’m responsible for creating that structure for myself.”

Stokes served in Iraq and says crowded, busy places have been hard for him since. He takes functional mushroom supplements before those situations and says he feels more able to stay focused on the task in front of him. He is careful with the claim. “Be curious, but don’t expect a miracle,” he said.

The Evidence Gap

He is right to hedge. The research on microdosing and performance is thin and contested. A 2021 placebo-controlled study published in eLife found that people who microdosed reported better well-being, but so did people who unknowingly took placebos, and the difference between the groups was not significant. Brands in this space sell a feeling first and a mechanism second.

The law is uneven, too. Psilocybin remains illegal under federal law. Oregon and Colorado run regulated programs, and New Mexico became the third state to legalize medical access in 2025. Most workplace drug policies were written long before a mushroom tablet could be named after a job interview.

Read the Label on Your Workday

If you are experimenting with any of this, treat it like any other tool you bring to work. Know exactly what you are taking, because “mushroom” on a label can mean anything from lion’s mane to a controlled substance. Check your state’s law and your employer’s drug policy before you assume either is on your side. Then be honest about what you are dosing for.

Finkle’s advice to millennials sitting on a side project is to reframe failure as data. Her sales are data, too. When the bestseller is named PTO, customers are telling you what they are short on. For a lot of millennial workers, the fix the job needs is probably a real day off rather than a sharper version of themselves.