The four dose ranges
These are typical ranges for an opioid-naive adult with no kratom tolerance, using standard leaf powder at roughly 1.2–1.8% mitragynine. Your personal ranges will shift with body weight, tolerance, strain, and whether you ate recently. See our full dosage guide for dose-by-weight charts.
Threshold dose: 0.5–1.5 g
Most users feel a faint mood lift and a touch more focus, similar to a single small cup of coffee but qualitatively different. Some people feel nothing at all at this range. This is the cleanest possible kratom experience — no sedation, no opioid character, just a slight signal that you took something. Threshold doses are useful for tolerance-management, for first-time users who want to confirm they tolerate kratom before going higher, and for daily users looking to maintain low dose habits.
Low dose: 1.5–3.5 g
The classic stimulant window. Expect noticeably increased focus, mild energy, improved mood, faster verbal engagement, and a sense of motivation. Whites and greens dominate this range — see our white vein guide and green vein guide. Onset is typically 20–40 minutes; duration 3–4 hours. Side effects at this range are usually limited to mild nausea, mostly preventable with food.
Moderate dose: 3.5–5.5 g
The transition zone. Effects start mixed: still some focus and warmth, but with a creeping sense of body relaxation. This is where greens often hit their peak — strong enough to feel substantial but not yet sedative. Reds at this range can already feel meaningfully sedative for many users. Pain relief starts to register here too. This is also the dose range where individual crossover happens for most people — body weight matters a lot at this range.
High dose: 5.5–8 g
Sedative-dominant. Body heavy, mental focus less sharp, eyelids heavy, strong relaxation, significant pain relief. This is where kratom feels most explicitly opioid-like. Reds dominate this range — see our red vein guide. Duration extends to 5–6 hours. Nausea risk is meaningfully higher at this range — see our side effects guide for management. Doses above this range are higher-risk and offer diminishing returns: most users report the experience plateaus and side effects climb faster than therapeutic benefit.
What shifts the curve
The dose ranges above are starting points, not absolutes. Four factors move them significantly.
Body weight. A 100 kg adult and a 60 kg adult will not have the same response to 3 g. Per-kg dosing is more accurate than absolute dosing, particularly at the extremes. Rough rule: 50–80 mg of dried leaf per kg of body weight is the low-dose range; 80–120 mg/kg is moderate; above that is high.
Tolerance. Daily users see the entire curve shift right. A 6 g dose for a daily user feels like a 3 g dose for a no-tolerance user — and crucially, the stimulant phase flattens faster than the sedative phase. That is why long-term daily users often complain that kratom "only sedates now," even though when they started it lifted them. Rotation slows this shift — see our strain rotation schedule.
Food. A meal in your stomach slows mitragynine absorption and dampens the peak. The same dose taken on an empty stomach feels noticeably stronger and shorter-acting; with a meal it feels gentler and longer. Fatty meals slow absorption most. If you want crisp stimulant effects, take it on a near-empty stomach. If you want a smoother experience or less nausea, take it after eating.
Strain. The same gram quantity of leaf can feel like a different dose depending on strain. Specifically, a 7-hydroxymitragynine-leaning strain (most reds, well-aged or fermented yellows) will feel sedative at a dose where a fresh-mitragynine-dominant strain (most whites) still feels stimulant. The dose-by-dose curve is real, but it sits on top of the strain profile.
Reading your own curve
Most users discover their personal crossover dose by accident. A cleaner way: start at a known low dose and step up by half-gram increments across separate days. Keep a single variable — same strain, same time of day, same eating state. Note the effects after 90 minutes. Within a week you will have a personal map of where stimulation peaks for you, where the transition zone starts, and where sedation takes over.
Two cautions on this approach. First, do not repeat doses within a day to try to "map faster" — that distorts the curve and accelerates tolerance. Second, recognize that the curve you measure is for that strain. The same dose of a different strain may put you in a different zone.
Common dose-curve mistakes
Chasing sedation by stacking on top of a stimulant dose. Once the stimulant phase is active and you re-dose for sedation, you get a combined load that peaks unpredictably. If you want sedation, take the sedative dose at the start.
Reading a strain at one dose and generalizing. "Red Bali is too sedating for me" might just mean "Red Bali at 4 g is too sedating for me at noon." The same strain at 2 g, or at 9 pm, or after dinner, behaves differently.
Ignoring tolerance. The dose that felt right on day one will not feel right on day 30 if you have been daily. You can either escalate (which makes the dose-curve harder to navigate and accelerates further tolerance), or you can keep the dose flat, rotate strains, and take rest days.
Choosing the right dose for the goal
- Focus / productivity: 1.5–3 g white or green vein on an empty or near-empty stomach, morning or early afternoon.
- Mood lift / social: 2–3 g green vein, with or shortly after a light meal.
- Workout energy: 1.5–2.5 g white vein 30–45 minutes pre-workout, ideally on a light stomach. See our workout guide.
- Pain relief / relaxation: 3.5–5 g red vein, with or after food to reduce nausea.
- Evening wind-down / sleep support: 4–5 g red vein 60–90 minutes before bed. See our kratom for sleep guide.
These are baseline ranges for no-tolerance users. Adjust down if you are sensitive or have a low body weight; adjust up modestly if tolerance has built. Avoid jumping above 7 g without a deliberate reason — side effect risk rises faster than therapeutic benefit at that range.
The 4 Leaf Herbals take
The dose-response curve only behaves predictably when each batch contains what the label says it contains. A batch labeled "1.5% mitragynine" that actually runs 0.9% will feel like a low dose at what should be a moderate dose, which causes users to escalate — often into much higher real doses than they realize. 4 Leaf Herbals publishes selected product- and batch-specific reports in its lab results library. Match the product and lot or batch identifier, then review the analytes, methods, limits, and results shown; a report applies only to its identified sample. Or run the strain finder to match a strain to where you want to be on the curve.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does kratom flip from stimulant to sedative as the dose increases?
Kratom's primary alkaloid, mitragynine, is a partial agonist at the mu-opioid receptor and also stimulates alpha-2 adrenergic receptors. At low doses, the adrenergic stimulation dominates the subjective effect — increased alertness, mild energy, mood lift. As the dose climbs, the opioid-receptor activity also climbs, eventually outweighing the adrenergic signal. That is the biphasic response: stimulant-dominant at low doses, opioid-dominant at higher ones. It is not unique to kratom — several plant alkaloids show similar dose-dependent dual profiles — but kratom's crossover happens in a fairly narrow dose window, which is what makes dose control matter so much.
What dose does the stimulant-to-sedative crossover happen at?
For most people, somewhere between 4 and 7 grams of dried leaf, with significant individual variation. Body weight, tolerance, strain, and whether you have food in your stomach all shift the threshold. A 60 kg user with no tolerance might cross over at 3 g; a 100 kg long-term user might still feel stimulant-dominant at 8 g. The crossover is not a hard line — it is a sliding mix, with sedation gradually displacing stimulation as the dose climbs. Most users find their personal crossover by accident — they take 'a little extra' one day and notice the effect feels qualitatively different.
Is one effect 'better' than the other?
Neither is better — they serve different purposes. Stimulant doses fit daytime use cases: focus, productivity, mild energy, social engagement, workouts. Sedative doses fit evening use cases: relaxation, sleep support, pain relief, recovery. Many users move between the two on the same week, deliberately. The problem comes when people accidentally take a sedative dose when they wanted a stimulant one (or vice versa) and then either dose more on top, push through, or write off the strain incorrectly. Knowing where you are on the curve before you dose prevents that.
Does the dose-response curve apply to extracts and gummies the same way?
Yes, but the unit changes. Extract and gummy doses are typically expressed in milligrams of mitragynine rather than grams of leaf. As a rough conversion, 1 gram of standard leaf at 1.5% mitragynine equals about 15 mg of mitragynine. So the 4–7 g leaf crossover roughly translates to 60–100 mg of mitragynine from any format. Extracts and gummies can also have higher 7-hydroxymitragynine ratios than leaf, which shifts the dose-response curve toward the sedative side faster — meaning extracts often cross over to sedation at a lower mitragynine equivalent than leaf does.
Can I take a stimulant dose, wait, and then add more for a sedative effect?
Technically yes, but it is not a reliable strategy. Re-dosing within a few hours stacks the alkaloid load while your liver is still metabolizing the first dose. The result is unpredictable: sometimes you get the sedation you wanted, sometimes you get a much heavier dose than you intended because the first dose was still active when the second one peaked. If you want a sedative dose, it is cleaner to take the full sedative dose at once than to step into it. Re-dosing also accelerates tolerance much faster than single dosing.
Why do some users say they never feel the stimulant effects?
Three common reasons. First, they started with a dose already past their personal crossover — so they have never experienced the low-dose stimulant window. Second, the strain matters: reds and some specialty extracts run high in 7-hydroxymitragynine and lean sedative even at low doses, masking the stimulant phase. Third, tolerance flattens the stimulant phase faster than the sedative phase, so long-term daily users often retain sedation while losing the early-dose energy lift. If you have never felt stimulation from kratom, try a fresh white-vein leaf at 1.5–2.5 g on a relatively empty stomach after a 3+ day break.