Rethinking Energy: Mabel’s Functional Mushroom Rituals for Circadian Care
*MABEL
*MABEL
Functional mushrooms are entering a new phase, moving from trend-driven products to thoughtful daily routines. Mabel is part of this shift, reframing these ingredients through the lens of circadian care with four formulas that fit easily into real life.
I started using Mabel more than 6 months ago. It wasn’t just a “product test.” It was a real companion. I carried it through seasons, end of winter’s heaviness, spring’s slow reopening, the unstructured energy of summer, the mental acceleration of September. The routines held. They didn’t demand a new lifestyle; they adapted to mine.
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And then there’s the founder, Pernille Brostrup. Meeting her changed the way I understood the brand. In our interview, she spoke openly about burnout and the cognitive fog that left her feeling detached from her own mind, the kind of exhaustion that forces you to renegotiate everything. Lion’s mane was the first small signal of return: not a transformation, but the moment you realize you can finish a thought again. Co-founded with her sister Caroline Brostrup, Mabel began as a form of survival and slowly became a generous offering. In a wellness landscape full of polished narratives, this story is lived, grounded, intact.
What I find compelling is how the line is structured. Instead of organizing products by “concerns”, stress, focus, sleep, Mabel builds around time. Morning and night. Mannas and beverages. Four gestures placed along the circadian rhythm, as if someone looked at a chaotic week and drew a single coherent line through it.
Morning Manna is the starting point. Slim, single-serve sticks delivering a liquid blend of dual-extracted lion’s mane and cordyceps in an organic flaxseed glycerin base. Behind that simplicity sits a clear intention: give the brain and adrenals something steadier than caffeine. Lion’s mane for clarity and memory. Cordyceps for cellular stamina. The goal isn’t stimulation; it’s noticing, around 11 a.m., that your mind is still intact.
Midnight Manna mirrors the gesture for evening. Same format, different pair: reishi and chaga. If Morning Manna supports the hours where we push, Midnight Manna supports the hours where we pretend we’re resting while doom-scrolling under blue light. Earthy, slightly sweet, taken thirty to sixty minutes before bed, it slows you down just enough to enter the night deliberately. Reishi brings nervous system regulation and softer cortisol curves; chaga adds dense antioxidant support. More than anything, it reframes sleep as something you prepare for, not collapse into.
Morning Coffee addresses the most universal ritual of all. Coffee is both a love language and a crutch; we crave it, knowing exactly how it will betray us later. Mabel doesn’t try to replace coffee. It rewires the ritual just enough to make it compatible with a sensitized nervous system. The blend, organic Arabica, lion’s mane, cordyceps, MCT oil, behaves like instant coffee but feels smoother, rounder, more supportive. The idea is simple: keep the pleasure, lose the crash.
If Morning Coffee is about not burning through the day too fast, Midnight Cacao is about landing gently. Possibly the most sensual product in the line, it combines organic cacao with reishi, chaga, date powder and Himalayan salt. Made with hot water, it’s an adult hot chocolate, bitter enough to feel grounding, sweet enough to feel comforting. Cacao brings magnesium and theobromine; the mushrooms do their quiet work; the dates add a slow, caramel warmth.
Across all four products, there’s a deliberate refusal of spectacle. These are routines built for real life: tossed into a kitchen drawer, sitting on a nightstand, next to a laptop that never fully shuts down. If a ritual feels like a performance, it won’t survive. Mabel knows this.
Zoomed out, it aligns with a larger cultural shift. Functional mushroom coffees and adaptogenic beverages are no longer fringe. People want to feel awake without feeling attacked by their own nervous system. But many products in this space still behave like gadgets, exciting for a season, then forgotten. Mabel takes a different path: anchoring the conversation in women’s mental health, hormonal fluctuations, and circadian stability. This isn’t aspirational wellness; it’s nervous-system maintenance for people who cannot afford another burnout.
That’s ultimately what draws me in: Mabel doesn’t promise a new self. It offers a more coherent day. Morning and night. Coffee and cacao. Mannas under the tongue. Small, repeatable gestures that treat the circadian rhythm as something worth designing for, not something to fight against. And in a culture that still glorifies exhaustion, that feels quietly radical.
Read the full interview with Pernille Brostrup on Future of Skincare
