Trends with Benefits | Volume 301 | 05/06/2026

MUDWTR fam, I used to think the goal of a morning routine was to be calm. Turns out, that was kind of backwards. Cortisol, the hormone we love to blame for everything, is supposed to spike in the morning. That spike is what wakes you up. It's called the cortisol awakening response, and a healthy one looks like a wave: a sharp peak about 30 minutes after you open your eyes, then a slow fade through the day, then near-zero by bedtime. A flat curve. That's the problem. Not a high one. Not a low one. A flat one, which is what chronic stress looks like on a graph. The wave gets squashed. You wake up tired. You crash at 3pm. You're wired at 11pm. I've been going down a rabbit hole on functional mushrooms this month, and the part I find genuinely interesting isn't "they reduce cortisol." It's that they don't. They modulate. Here's the part that surprised me: research on Reishi (specifically a class of compounds called triterpenes — ganoderic acids, if you want to drop them at a dinner party) suggests it can actually raise cortisol in people whose stress response has gone blunted, and lower it in people running too hot. The mushroom doesn't push in one direction. It pushes toward the right shape of the curve. This is what the word adaptogen was coined for, by the way. A Soviet scientist named Nikolai Lazarev came up with it in 1947 while trying to help cosmonauts and soldiers handle stress without sedating them. The whole point was: don't flatten the response. Sharpen it. Cordyceps does something similar with the cortisol response to physical stress. Lion's Mane works on a different lever, supporting BDNF, the protein your neurons use to grow. Now, what functional mushrooms are NOT doing: They're not getting you high. They're not going to fix a sleep schedule that's a war crime, a diet that's mostly seed oil, or a job that makes you cry on Sundays. The effects are subtle and cumulative. If your adrenals are actually broken, see a doctor, not a powder. But if you want a morning ritual that nudges your cortisol curve back into a wave instead of a pancake, that's something functional mushrooms can do. Which is part of why we made MUDWTR Original. Not coffee. Not exactly a coffee replacement, either — it's its own thing. 35mg of caffeine (about a seventh of what's in a regular cup of coffee), 2,240mg of the four functional mushrooms (Lion's Mane, Chaga, Reishi, Cordyceps), with a base of cacao, chai spices, and prebiotics for the gut. Less caffeine to flatten the curve. More mushroom to help shape it. —Shane

/ Watch Heroic Dose We made a short film about a guy taking what he calls a "heroic dose" of functional mushrooms — locked in a quiet room, ready to stare into the abyss — to overthrow his daily cup of joe. It does not go how you think it goes. (It's also funny.) | Watch

/ DRINK MUDWTR Original A seventh of the caffeine of coffee, four functional mushrooms, cacao, and chai. The blend that started the company, and the one we still drink most. | Get it

/ DRINK MUDWTR Original A seventh of the caffeine of coffee, four functional mushrooms, cacao, and chai. The blend that started the company, and the one we still drink most. | Get it

/ LEARN | Heroic Hearts Project | After serving as an Army Ranger, Jesse Gould came home with what most combat veterans come home with — and not a lot of effective options. He started Heroic Hearts Project to help vets access plant medicine therapy for PTSD. They've put hundreds of veterans through programs the VA can't yet legally offer. Worth knowing about, regardless of how you feel about psychedelics. | Learn More

/INSPIRATION | "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." | — Lao Tzu

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