Functional mushrooms like lion’s mane and reishi have become one of wellness’s fastest-growing categories, turning up in everything from celebrity gummies to coffee. Here’s why a burnt-out generation can’t stop reaching for them.
Lion’s mane mushroom, which grows in dense white cascades from the trunks of dead oak trees in forests across North America and Asia, does not look like something you would put in a gummy. It looks like something that washed up on a beach; it smells, when raw, faintly of lobster. For centuries, it was gathered by Buddhist monks who believed it sharpened the mind during long meditation sessions and was prescribed by Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners for ailments ranging from fatigue to poor digestion.
For most of that time, it stayed quietly where it was — in forests, in apothecary texts, in the herbal knowledge of communities that had never stopped paying attention to what grew in the woods. Then, in roughly the last five years, it ended up in Kourtney Kardashian’s Lemme wellness gummies, in Rockstar energy drinks, in cold brew coffee at airport kiosks, and on the skincare shelf at Sephora. Reishi and cordyceps followed, tucked into facial serums, luxury beverages, and adaptogenic cocktail mixers. The commute from dead oak trunk to morning supplement ritual is, by any measure, a significant one.
Christian Rasmussen, the CEO of Amentara, a Minneapolis-based functional mushroom company, has been watching this from close range. He started in the category when functional mushrooms were still a niche proposition — something you’d find at a natural foods co-op, packaged in utilitarian brown bottles with small-print ingredient lists, purchased by people who already knew what hericenones were. That is not the category anymore. “Functional mushrooms are evolving from niche supplements into a broader wellness lifestyle space,” he told Ethos, “and consumers now expect products to feel intentional, beautiful, and experiential — not just functional.”
The nervous system is the new wellness frontier
The global functional mushroom market was valued at $35 billion in 2025, according to Future Market Insights, and is projected to reach $77 billion by 2035. Google searches for “lion’s mane for ADHD” jumped 300 percent in a single year; on TikTok, hashtags like #mushroomgummies and #adaptogens have accumulated millions of views. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop has sold mushroom supplements for years, and its Netflix series dedicated an entire episode to fungi. Mushroom coffee now turns up on chain restaurant menus alongside staples.
The people driving those numbers are, broadly, young, and they are not doing it because they feel well. A 2024 industry survey of more than 8,000 people found that Gen Z over-indexes in functional mushroom consumption by more than ten percentage points over every other age group; a Newsweek poll found that 72 percent of Gen Z and 77 percent of millennials report at least one symptom of burnout.
“I think younger generations are exhausted by the pace and artificiality of modern life,” Rasmussen says. “People are spending more time online than ever, dealing with constant stimulation, stress, burnout, and disconnection from nature, so there’s a growing desire for tools that feel grounding, intentional, and genuinely supportive.” There is also, he notes, a generational shift in what wellness is even supposed to accomplish. “There’s been a huge shift away from purely aesthetic wellness into experiential wellness,” he says. “People don’t just want to ‘look healthy’ anymore — they want to feel calmer, clearer, more focused, emotionally balanced, and resilient in daily life.” What the category offers is not a cure but an orientation: health as cumulative and interconnected rather than reactive. “Wellness is becoming less about ‘hacking yourself’ and more about creating sustainable daily rhythms that actually support wellbeing long term,” Rasmussen says. “It’s a shift from performance-focused into nervous-system-focused.”
The science
Lion’s mane contains compounds called hericenones and erinacines, which stimulate the production of nerve growth factor — the protein that signals brain cell repair and regeneration. A 2023 pilot study in Nutrients found that a single dose led to faster performance on cognitive tasks and a trend toward reduced subjective stress over 28-day supplementation. A 2025 double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in Frontiers in Nutrition found benefits were task-specific rather than sweeping; certain cognitive domains showed meaningful improvement, but broad gains across all measures were not observed. Reishi, meanwhile, has demonstrated cortisol-regulating and sleep-supportive properties in clinical contexts, and cordyceps is associated with energy and cellular oxygen utilization. The science is real and still incomplete — which is roughly where research on most supplements finds itself, and which has not historically slowed their adoption.
Mycologist and researcher Paul Stamets, whose decades of fungal work have made him the category’s most-cited scientific voice, has argued in a 2026 interview with the University of Washington’s Daily that mushrooms occupy a singular position in biology, having evolved compounds capable of directly interfacing with human neurochemistry in ways that plants cannot. Rasmussen puts the breadth of that appeal in practical terms. “Few categories feel as multidimensional,” he says. “They touch cognition, stress support, energy, immunity, emotional wellbeing, recovery, and longevity — and that gives mushrooms a broader emotional and functional appeal than many single-purpose supplements. Beyond marketing, many consumers genuinely feel subtle but meaningful benefits from incorporating them consistently into their routines, and that creates strong long-term loyalty and curiosity around the category.”
The companies that figure out how to deliver on that — through sourcing quality, transparency, and design — will define what the category looks like in a decade. “The companies that build trust, community, and meaningful experiences around these products are the ones that will stand out long term,” Rasmussen says. The monks who gathered lion’s mane from forest oaks a thousand years ago would not recognize a matte ceramic jar of mushroom cold brew, but the underlying premise — that this particular fungus was worth paying close attention to — has not, across all that time, substantially changed.
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