My 16-month theanine self-experiment

This is great. The author defines their own metrics, is doing their own A&#x2F;B tests and publishes their interpretation plus the raw data. Imagine a world where all health blogging was like that.<p>Personally, I have not published any results yet, but I have been doing this type of experiments for 4 years now. And collected 48874 data points so far. I built a simple system to do it in Vim:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gibney.org&#x2F;a_syntax_for_self-tracking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gibney.org&#x2F;a_syntax_for_self-tracking</a><p>I also built a bunch of tooling to analyze the data.<p>I think that mankind could greatly benefit from more people doing randomized studies on their own. Especially if we find a way to collectively interpret the data.<p>So I really applaud the author for conducting this and especially for providing the raw data.<p>Reading through the article and the comments here on HN, I wish there was more focus on the interpretation of the experiment. Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.<p>Let&#x27;s look at the author&#x27;s interpretation. Personally, I find that part a bit short.<p>They calculated 4 p-values and write:<p><pre><code> Technically, I did find two significant results. </code></pre> I wonder what &quot;Technically&quot; means here. Are there &quot;significant results&quot; that are &quot;better&quot; than just &quot;technically significant results&quot;?<p>Then they continue:<p><pre><code> Of course, I don’t think this means I’ve proven theanine is harmful. </code></pre> So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?<p>It&#x27;s great that they offer the raw data. I look forward to taking a look at it later today.

For anyone looking for a sleep supplement, before you go down the rabbit hole of Theanine, Mg, etc. Try an OTC Azelastine or Fluticasone nasal spray for a month.<p>Turns out my chronic poor quality, restless sleep was a dust mite allergy that I should have figured out and treated a decade ago. Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth but didn&#x27;t have too many issues during the day. I was allergic to my bed.<p>Been using antihistamines, and a dehumidifier for several months now and sleeping better than I have in years. Given how extremely common mite allergies are there&#x27;s got to be a lot of folks with undiagnosed issues here.

While this may not be a perfectly executed study, the &quot;N=1 trial&quot; part is not the problem.<p>There have been numerous medical and scientific studies with N=1, known as N-of-1 trials. These trials are very useful in chronic conditions where symptoms are stable and measurable, allowing for multiple crossover periods to assess treatment effects accurately.<p>Also…don&#x27;t forget all the medical discoveries based on self-experimentation:<p>Werner Forssmann performed the first heart catheterization on himself. He got the Nobel prize.<p>Barry Marshal injected himself with heliobacter pylori to prove that it causes stomach ulcers. Also got the Nobel prize.<p>Jessie Lazear allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with yellow fever to prove his hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for transmission. No Nobel prize, but he did contract the disease, thus proving his hypothesis…before dying from yellow fever two weeks later.

From the discussions I&#x27;ve seen about theanine, the real benefit supposedly came when it was taken alongside caffeine. The thinking being that theanine moderated some of the jittery effects of caffeine, allowing the user to take higher doses of caffeine, which itself has some benefit on task concentration and focus.<p>I wish the author had spent time addressing that theory specifically.

&gt; I’ve long found that tea makes me much less nervous than coffee, even with equal caffeine. Many people have suggested theanine as the explanation, but I’m skeptical. Most tea only has ~5 mg of theanine per cup, while when people supplement, they take 100-400 mg. Apparently grassy shade-grown Japanese teas are particularly high in theanine. And I do find those teas particularly calming. But they still only manage ~25 mg per cup<p>It&#x27;s not uncommon for a substance to have different, even opposite effects at different doses. For example high dose melatonin can keep you up, and stress you out, whereas in most people you only need up to 1 mg to promote sleep.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hormesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hormesis</a>

This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don&#x27;t have time and energy to make it right now. I&#x27;d pay $25 a month or more.<p>Basically it&#x27;s an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenient to run multiple at once if that&#x27;s possible.<p>I&#x27;m not interested in generalizing, I just want to know if (for example) taking Vitamin D every day at 1000 iu is enough, or whether I should be taking more or less. I can get labs done on this, of course, but again I&#x27;m more interested in subjective wellbeing than blood levels beyond avoiding deficiency or hypervitaminosis.<p>Maybe such an app exists and I simply don&#x27;t know about it.

If anyone is interested in running their own self guided experiments, I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. We got in the top 3 on ProductHunt not too long ago [2], and I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;reflect-track-anything&#x2F;id6463800032">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;reflect-track-anything&#x2F;id64638...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;reflect-c052fea3-a982-46c0-aeb9-fe64a114e93c?utm_source=badge-top-post-badge&amp;utm_medium=badge#reflect-ad2b97ed-13af-443d-9f86-d9ed976d2479" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producthunt.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;reflect-c052fea3-a982-4...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.substack.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;reflectapp&#x2F;p&#x2F;my-experience-with-nootropic-coffee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.substack.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;reflectapp&#x2F;p&#x2F;my-experience-wit...</a>

This is nice. I love that people can be so rigorous and honest as well.<p>I just want to add that what brings my stress down (although I didn’t research it so thoroughly) is small rituals. Things to focus on, to do well, to “take a moment”. For me it’s making morning coffee. Making&#x2F;baking bread, filling the dishwasher.<p>Maybe I’m borderline OCD. But maybe many people are and just the rituals of taking pills (actually) relieves some stress. It seems so based on the study.<p>Edit Fwiw, being about 20 years into my scientific career I’ve also come to prefer just looking at the data.

Gwern has a large collection of blinded self-experiments. The only reason I suspect it’s not a more valued resource is that his results often contradict the popular wisdom in supplement communities.<p>His experiments with magnesium showed negative results: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;magnesium#experiment-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;magnesium#experiment-1</a><p>He tried LSD microdosing when the internet was convinced it was a miracle, but found no benefit and some concerning negative effects: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;nootropics#lsd-microdosing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;nootropics#lsd-microdosing</a><p>Contrast those results with some of the unbelievably positive anecdotes you read about magnesium, fish oil, B-vitamins, or even LSD micro dosing causing life changing positive effects.<p>It’s well known that placebo effect is a strong driver of perceived effects of most supplements. The placebo effect becomes much stronger when people are primed to expect large effects. Not coincidentally, the people who report the most dramatic effects are often those who consume large amounts of podcasts, YouTube videos, or social media influencer content about those supplements. If someone listens to a 3-hour Huberman Lab episode where he explains how a “protocol” or supplement will do amazing things while using (and frequently misusing) lots of neurotransmitter names and underpowered mouse studies, that person might become so primed to expect those effects that they’re nearly guaranteed to happen. In a weird way, that means it does actually <i>work</i> for them, but it’s not necessarily because the supplant is producing the outcome. It’s because they’re so deeply primed to expect the outcome (e.g. feeling more energy, relaxing to fall asleep) that they placebo themselves into making it happen.

I&#x27;ve been using L-Theanine for a over a year now and then and it definitely has effects!<p>I use it mostly for sleep 100-150mg in combination of 5HTP which I found it to be an incredible sleep cocktail. I generally don&#x27;t have trouble sleeping but this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9. Unsurprisingly, l-theanine is popular in lucid dreaming communities and while I have no particular interest lucid dreaming my dreams are definitely more vivid and most importantly instantly forgettable (like normal dreams are) which is the most desirable outcome imo.<p>250+mg does have my mind racing a bit and this dose will prevent me from falling asleep effectively (at body weight of 75kg), anything above 200mg seems too much imo for my body weight. So I think the effect is very much observable just through dose variability.<p>For day use I&#x27;ve tried l-theanine with caffeine in the morning and I&#x27;d say the effect is similar to mild adhd medication (I&#x27;ve been told it compares to like ~2mg of Ritallin or pinch of Kratom powder). Tho for me it always comes with side effects similar to a cup of too much coffee would have. I found that just like adhd medicine, it works best with a protein shake.<p>This is my unscientific anecdote, tho OP&#x27;s post makes me want to record my own experiences.

I was surprised that the author’s conclusion didn’t mention another model that looked consistent with the data: that theanine works slowly — over the course of a few days, not hours.<p>(I have no idea whether it would work like this. A placebo effect only is also consistent with the data.)

&gt; I think these are the possibilities:<p>&gt; Theanine works, but I got fake theanine. &lt;…&gt;<p>I’d add one more possibility: “Theanine works but I need a higher dosage to feel the effect.”<p>FWIW my purely anecdotal findings are that supplier does matter. Natural Factors Suntheanine gave me a noticeable effect. Nature’s way L-Theanine did not.

Good to see such experimentation, especially when the person conducting the experiments takes the results with a grain of salt. I was first exposed to supplements when I started lifting seriously, a decade ago. Man oh man, some people go crazy on supplements in that space, literally wasting hundreds of dollars every month, for years. And in the end the only three things that seem to do anything for lifters are: whey protein, creatine, and ZMA (Zinc&#x2F;Magnesium&#x2F;B6). I did waste quite a bit of money as well until I looked at the actual evidence.

I tried it and it never did anything, I tried all sorts of CBD products as well (while in SF) and I never noticed a thing.<p>The only thing that worked was microdosing shrooms which I&#x27;ve done twice in SF. I felt very calm and had a lot of novel ideas during these two days. Would recommend trying. Never microdosed LSD.

In my experience most pharmaceuticals and nutrients are rather well researched, and the results of scientific studies can be trusted most of the times.<p>So if most studies don&#x27;t show a significant improvement, the substance just doesn&#x27;t work. It&#x27;s even the opposite, just because a study showed some improvement over a bigger population, it doesn&#x27;t mean it works for you, or the improvement is noticeable to you.

Since reading Gwern&#x27;s essay on nootropics [1] I&#x27;ve wanted to experiment with theanine. Caffeine is obviously a fantastic stimulant, and I take care not to consume it too frequently (I try to limit my intake to no more than three times a week based on the research of Michael Dickens [2]).<p>As such, I have next to no tolerance. As great as having no tolerance is for the productivity benefits, it does have undesirable side effects. A single cup of coffee can get me twitchy and slightly shaky, and a cup of tea past noon can impact my ability to fall asleep.<p>A gripe I have is the lack of good research into the combination of theanine <i>and</i> caffeine, and I think I&#x27;d be a good candidate for a blinded test looking into it. I would like to carry one out but really do lack experience in tests of this nature.<p>Does anyone know any good resources for someone interested in learning how to conduct a self-study such as this, including details regarding common pitfalls?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;nootropics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;nootropic&#x2F;nootropics</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mdickens.me&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;11&#x2F;caffeine_self_experiment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mdickens.me&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;11&#x2F;caffeine_self_experiment&#x2F;</a>

There&#x27;s a great podcast by Andrew Huberman on dopamine I listened to last week where he discusses theanine at the end. It&#x27;s a fantastic (but 3 hour long) primer[0] for anyone wanting to learn more.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hubermanlab.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;controlling-your-dopamine-for-motivation-focus-and-satisfaction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hubermanlab.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;controlling-your-dopamin...</a>

It is strange to discuss L-theanine with vitamin D as one has nothing much to do with the other. It could&#x27;ve been better to compare L-theanine with a placebo (cellulose) which is how research conventionally works.<p>L-theanine at 200-300 mg before bed is extremely useful for canceling excessive caffeine while trying to sleep at night. Add piperine to the mix for possible further cancelation of caffeine. [PMID 35684048]

By giving these things to random people, we don&#x27;t do a very good job of evaluating their effects. If something works on 10% of the population, randomly selecting participants in an experiment will never give a significant result. If something is generally safe, it seems better to experiment on yourself.<p>The problem this solves is that some things work on some people. Neurotransmitters are blunt instruments that do many things- and are subject to adaptation effects where you get an effect for a while then the system adjusts to the new baseline. Maybe someone out there has a deficiency and adding more helps them for a bit, other people don&#x27;t have a deficiency and get no results. Other people have a deficiency, something works for a little bit, then the brain adjusts to the new levels and the effect slowly disappears.<p>Until we can measure the level of the physiological effect we are targeting, the n=1 experiment seems like the only real way to see what group you fall into.

&gt;Many people try theanine and report wow or great for ADHD or cured my (social) anxiety or changing my life [...] But does it really work?<p>As someone who has dealt with insomnia and anxiety disorder in the past, the answer to that is, no. If green tea cured anxiety you&#x27;d know by now and all of Asia would be anxiety free.<p>Insomniacs will usually do the reverse, they&#x27;ll say manically monitor every bit of caffeine they consume, yet when you read studies, giving people 400 mg of caffeine (~4 cups of coffee) delays sleep by 30 minutes or so. That&#x27;s not why you lay awake hours, likewise nothing you get over the counter fixes your anxiety.<p>These things are crutches and attachments people take (or avoid) to try to control anxiety, which makes it worse. The solution to this isn&#x27;t turning yourself into a laboratory, which is very common behavior.

Ironically Now Foods L-theanine used to be a variant of a special extraction method named Suntheanine but that’s no longer the case, probably due to cost.<p>I’ve had good luck with the Suntheanine brands. GNC brand has been effective for me. YMMV.

The biggest takeaway for me is how unreliable our subjective sense of &quot;this works&quot; can be without proper controls. Also, the way placebo + regression to the mean can make almost anything seem effective in the moment

Buy supplements in POWDER FORM when possible if you don&#x27;t need enteric capsule, etc.<p>It eliminates other contaminant&#x2F;padding, no capsule materials to worry about.<p>You can then also vary the dose size to see if there is a tipping point where it works.<p>For all we know the author was overweight and the mg of Theanine vs KG of weight was not enough for any effect.<p>And Theanine DEFINITELY &quot;works for me&quot;. Not even a question of doubt.<p>I always take a 1&#x2F;4 teaspoon before bed. If I forget on rare occasion I find myself wondering why I can&#x27;t fall asleep until I remember.

This is good. If anyone wants to do a follow-up I’d like to see a higher dosage used, and I’d like to see the effect of weekly supplementation, eg each week you fill your pill-box either with vit-d or l-theanine and rate the week as a whole (with some blinding process). Finally interested in populations with high caffeine use.<p>If I had billg money, I’d divert some of it into just running high quality tests of all these “maybe” supplements.

Great experiment! It’s important to highlight that even in rigorously blinded studies which find a drug ineffective on average, there can still be genuine responders—this is known scientifically as “heterogeneous treatment effects.” Essentially, individuals vary in genetics, metabolism, and neurochemistry, which can cause meaningful differences in drug responsiveness. Thus, an N=1 trial, like yours, might indeed reveal real personal benefits that wouldn’t appear in a population-level analysis.<p>However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.

&gt;One study they review found that theanine worked better than alprazolam (xanax) for acute anxiety. The correct response would be, “That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion casts doubt on everything.” But the review sort of takes it at value and moves on.<p>“That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion reveals why we don&#x27;t use single studies to draw conclusions as it&#x27;s not only possible but expected that some percentage of study results are going to be well outside 2 standard deviations from the mean.”<p>I just wanna nitpick that because one of my pet peeves is people not realizing that you can follow the scientific method really well and still end up with outlier data.

I appreciate the high agency and citizen science here. However, I think 1) theanine should not be isolated but ingested in context (via a nice pot of tea) 2) there should be a little bit more respect for statistical methods.<p>While those two points appear to be contradictory (the first appears to inject noise&#x2F;variability, the second is intended to reduce noise), I believe they each produce a superior result. Regarding the first point (drinking tea instead of ingesting a capsule), theanine does not operate in isolation, but instead interacts significantly with other compounds. Regarding the second point, statistics are the lifeblood of these kinds of trials, what is the purpose of a series of trials without a correct analysis? (I believe it should be standard to devote a huge chunk of time to getting the math right during the analysis, even though it is hard&#x2F;unintuitive.)

I tried 200mg L-theanine pills for some days. I noticed a slightly calming effect, but after the supposed effect wore off, I suffered from unusually high level of anxiety. So I guess it can give you withdrawal symptoms. CBD worked much better for me in that regard.

Love the methodology and the thoughtful analysis long term in-depth trial. I&#x27;m actually working on a project very similar to this. It&#x27;s related to self testing and doing correlation analysis for all types of nutritional supplements. Thanks for sharing

I have taken a lot at times, up to 1-2g per day in powder form. I mix it with my tea, which also has theanine.<p>However I can&#x27;t say it really helped with anxiety. TFA says some people claim its more effective than xanax. Maybe it works like that for some people, but not for me - it doesn&#x27;t even put a dent in my anxiety - which can be pretty bad (struggling to leave the house). I&#x27;ve never taken xanax either, although my doc once gave me 10 pills of lorezepam for acute anxiety situations. Those basically had no effect on me too.<p>Theanine does reduce caffeine jitters although I usually only have that problem with coffee. These days I take 200mg most days mostly out of habit.

After reading a few paragraphs about theanine and dopamine and all the other amino acids, anyone else get to<p>&gt; Examine is an independent website that’s respected for summarizing the scientific literature on health and supplements<p>and read that website name as &quot;exa-meen&quot;?

Wish more people would report their placebo experiments. I have periodically run them on myself, and am consistently surprised how I have been unable to differentiate substances I thought were helpful (adderall, kratom) end up indistinguishable from placebo over 20+ trials. I guess that my main takeaway was that it is hard to pinpoint when subtle drugs work. My second takeaway was that the data I generated would prob be useful to share, but with no examples anyone cared I opted against. This story inspires me to potentially revisit some of my past placebo tests and show my data.

As a person who drinks tea for 30+ year old in a country which is top 3 in world tea consumption, I can say that theanine works. The biggest advantage of it when compared to caffeine, it doesn&#x27;t create that tension in the body. You just work and concentrate. While it&#x27;s not as powerful as caffeine, it allows one to work very efficiently and for long hours, <i>if they choose to do so</i>.<p>Also, against the popular myth, black tea &#x2F; theanine doesn&#x27;t affect iron absorption that much (if any), if it was, the whole country would be anemic, and we are not.

I’m not sure, but seems like there should be a difference between someone conducting research while testing theanine versus someone just consuming theanine to battle anxiety. That’s probably been said in other comments in a more scientific way. But it also seems like consuming yummy hot tea that happen to have theanine would be another relevant method for comparison. Maybe placebo, theanine pill, and tea drink (or other naturally occurring food source)? It just seems like the tea or act of drinking tea and the time it takes might be relaxing??

Since no one has mentioned it yet, given the author felt like Japanese tea was providing a calming &#x2F; anti-anxiety effect but with a much lower potential dose of Theanine....I wonder what would happen if he repeated the experiment with a sub-lingual dosing mechanism?<p>It seems like this would be closer to taking the tea in your mouth and savoring it over multiple sips across a few minutes, and could explain the smaller apparent dose having an effect (some of the Theanine goes straight into the bloodstream and bypasses the digestive tract).

Cool experiment!<p>Once the author started taking pills independently of their stress level, the variance of differences diminished a lot. I&#x27;d wager this supports the mean reversion hypothesis.<p>Also, while I agree with their general conclusion that theanine probably doesn&#x27;t reduce stress, I&#x27;d give assign more probability to the hypothesis that theanine does work, but in other design settings. For example: drinking tea instead of taking pills, or measuring stress levels after a day instead of an hour, or evaluating the difference across time instead of in time chunks.

This is the first time I&#x27;ve seen a self-study with l-theanine in the context of stress relief. In fact, somehow, it&#x27;s the first time I&#x27;ve ever seen stress relief mentioned on the topic. For me it has always been about providing a small cognitive boost. The result is clear: for this particular individual, and the specific goal of stress relief, l-theanine does not work.<p>My anecdote: I used l-theanine supplement for about a year straight. To me, the noticable effect was similar to that of a cup of coffee but with practically none of the jitters.

From a biology perspective base amino acids (such as theanine) on their own are not generally major modulators of human function. You want to experiment with small molecules, something that binds with proteins such as enzymes which in turn modulate pathways and cell functions.<p>Binders need a energy configuration and 3 dimensional structures that &quot;fits&quot; into such proteins, and individual amino acids dont really cut it. Also the amino acids get rapidly used for protein construction so they dont stick around long.<p>PhDs in the subject can please correct me I am wrong here.

I wish people can pay for trials on products. e.g. In subreddits for hairfall, people cite all sort of very badly done research that shows some chemical in expensive product as effective, for which the only research is sponsored by the company making it. If 1000 people in that subreddit pays $100, it might be enough for a good trial and knowing the active people there, they would likely pay even more. Same for multivitamins, the research on that is so important yet so bad and biased, and getting million dollar crowdfunding should be possible.

I suspect that the placebo effect can be very strong in anxiety situations.<p>And on top of pure placebo. The whole rite of going to the kitchen and prepare your little pill has a calming effect in itself.<p>And maybe matcha is the same. Its preparation is slow and requires attention.<p>Much like smoking, it’s difficult to know how much of the calm it provides come nicotin or from slower&#x2F;deeper breathing, just going outside and talking to strangers.<p>I have chronic insomnia that is turning severe, so I really want to believe these things work, but so far, they’re all very pricey and completely useless on sleep.

I take L-theanine for ADHD<p>1. Theanine is an analog for Glutamate and Glutamine. 2. Due to indirect relationships to ADHD, Depression, etc. no one take Theanine by itself...I do not. 3. When drugs are created we often have incomplete pictures, for example SSSrIs for depression...we now know its both low levels in serotonin and GABA combined...bias yes I take Theanine, GABA and Glutamine for depression and it does work.<p>One experiment on oneself means very little...I know as I spent 36 months finding the combo that works for my depression and ADHD.

A bit unrelated, but try having l theanine after a night of drinking: it makes you wake up fresh and without a hangover because it speeds up alcohol processing and it metabolites by the liver and also prevents alcoholic liver damage. Me and all my friends who tried it say “i wake up totally fresh after theanine”. There’s also a study confirming this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;16141543&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;16141543&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been conducting a self-experiment on the effects of various substances (all legal and easily accessible) on sleep for about four months, following a similar approach to the author. Using two different sleep trackers, I rely solely on absolute, measurable values, avoiding subjective impressions. It&#x27;s fun but requires time and patience—sometimes I have to restart cycles from scratch. So far, I’ve gathered datasets for Phenibut, Theanine, Piracetam, and Baclofen. The experiment is still ongoing.

I love theanine as a low-level anxiolytic. My recommendation:<p>* Try a lower dosage first. 400mg made me irritable. 100mg works great for me.<p>* Effect seems to lessen if taken consecutive days; in fact it might have the opposite effect of making one more irritable than calmer.<p>A few nights ago I was tossing and turning because I had too much coffee before bed. A theanine pill and sleep was restored. It doesn&#x27;t do much more than that, but it&#x27;s good to have for one of <i>those</i> days that you just want to punch a wall.

&gt; Many people try theanine and report wow or great for ADHD or cured my (social) anxiety or changing my life.<p>I&#x27;d never heard of that.<p>All my life I&#x27;ve drank enormous amounts of tea. To the point that I&#x27;ve had withdrawal symptoms from physical caffeine addiction. But I&#x27;m only recognizing more ADHD symptoms the more I read about it. (Not a controlled experiment; I&#x27;m aware of that.)<p>I am pretty relaxed, though.

Amino Acid therapy requires an empty stomach, and the postulated effects usually require larger doses. But that would blow up his experiment design. Also there can be time of day widows for efficacy. Science has gotten far with lock and key receptor models. But some of this stuff can be sensitive to time and cofactors, beyond genetic and epigenetic individual variance.

Following in the trend of the guy who tried LSD microdosing and concluded with cocksure fanfare it does nothing.<p>Which throws a veil of doubt over these kind of studies. Something is open to be defective in structure or presentation.<p>&quot;Daily intravenous heroin use - a placebo controlled self-administration study&quot; &quot;It does absolutely nothing&quot;<p>Would we all jump to the occasion of believing it, if the writeup is polished enough?

(Maybe it’s because tea is better than coffee?)<p>Coffee contains several ingredients that act as opioid receptor antagonists, which can be unpleasant (as in &quot;reverse the pleasant &#x2F; calming effects of endogenic opioids&quot;). Some people seem to be more affected than others, kinda like with the intensive gastrin release &#x2F; coffee induced instapoop.

I think the experiment is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption the time to metabolize medication is identical to time for the body to return to baseline.<p>Regular Vitamin-D supplements can taken once a week or daily and have the same long term effect.<p>And for a sample of N=1: The L-theanine side effects of one dose last several days. Taking it daily makes the side effects significantly worse.

I absolutely love how committed this author is to the science to the point where they managed to remain so objective.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams.<p>Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams.<p>That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.

What a waste of opportunity and time. All for nothing because author was too lazy to make blank capsules and used Vit D, which of course may have effect. You can buy capsules easily and have true blind test.

I don’t understand why they used another supplement hypothesized to mitigate stress as a control.

Good article. It demonstrates the necessity of rigorous clinical trials for therapeutic approval. It’s a very long and arduous process to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a new drug is effective.

&gt; This hacker news thread is full of positive reports,<p>Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical&#x2F;biological things.

The point to the story is that he ran his own trial on his own body and found that there wasn&#x27;t any benefit. Guys, it&#x27;s just an opinion...

Or maybe the stress-reducing effect carries over to the next day?<p>Stress has a habit of not being randomly reset to the default value every morning when you wake up

This is better conceived and more carefully controlled than the vast majority of the published research I see pouring out every week.

It&#x27;s a bit disappointing that Vitamin D was used as a control, since based on my research, Vitamin D does seem to have very significant effects on mood. Author says:<p>&gt; Vitamin D might have some effects on mood, but no one seems to claim that they’re <i>acute</i>, that you’d feel them within an hour.<p>As far as I remember, this is correct, which is to say, I&#x27;ve never read anything that claimed the effects of vitamin D were acute. However, this seems like it still leaves a pretty big gap to me: you&#x27;re taking a known mood-altering substance and basically hoping that the effects aren&#x27;t acute because nobody has bothered to test whether they are or not.<p>That said, this is a minor complaint, and this test is far more scientific than the vast majority of self-experiments.

sorry this experiment setup suffers from the photon dual slit experiment problems. How anxious am i really if i am observing my stress levels, noting down pre and post measurements? Placebo or not, this level of mindfulness is probably the biggest anxiety affecting factor so it invalidates the experiment.

Can for myself just say I took the anime for a while but don&#x27;t think it did anything. Way higher effect was switching to decaf and then drink mushroom coffee for alertness. There are different mixes out there, I just went with a random one from Amazon when I enjoyed some test-packages from chi-coffee. I&#x27;m also mixing with cocos cream and cows milk.

Got pretty powerful anxiety effect from it after taking it a while. Definitely not for me.

I like this work a lot.It seems like the sort of thing that if done by thousands of like minded people would build a knowlege base that cuts through the very very messy reality of life, and gets us closer to rules of thumb that might help. chinese medicine with techno characteristics? cyber herbal8sm :) we need an app for this<p>But... data eh?<p>the ONLY repository of data, is genes.vast, tested in deep time, with countless trilions of runs.now running on quintillions of test units. we have access to a tiny portion of the data, but are at the stage of? do you read the text from the right?left? top? bottom?, but of course its read as a gestalt, and so outside of our capacity.<p>What may be accessable, is our enzimatic relationships with the substances in our environment, and how those balances are specific to groups and individuals, but it wont be easy to unravel, records plus actual chemical testing of anything, anywhere, anytime which boils down to &quot;light&quot; sensors, that are capable of seeing and diferentiating the exicitation of molecules under ambiant conditions.<p>what is dismissed by so called science, are the indivuals who survive and thrive under exactly the same conditions that decimate there peers, and how &quot;science&quot; is perfectly happy to call something &quot;luck&quot; and then move towards monitising &quot;bad luck&quot; .....scientificly.....rather that work towards understanding the framework that governs everything

Glutamate is fascinating! The latest and greatest hypothesis for mood, learning, etc. hot off the press. Suddenly everything targets NMDA&#x2F;AMPA receptors and increases plasticity

For a community that prides itself on critical thinking, I&#x27;m always surprised to see HN lap this sort of pseudoscientific witch-doctor stuff up.<p>This poorly-controlled, N=1 experiment tells you nothing, not even about the author.<p>There&#x27;s absolutely no reason to consider these novice self-experiments when professional scientific experiments are available (unless you&#x27;re hunting for a specific result).

N is the way.

I am shocked, <i>shocked</i> that he published this without IRB approval. Where are the ethical standards?

Now Foods sponsored pill post

TL;DR single test at best inconclusive but broadly said no evident benefit. Good randomisation but so many variables.<p>I am convinced the author is in a persisting out of body state.<p>Also, placebo is great!! I have reverse white coat syndrome, paying my GP attendance fee to have a nice doctor measure my BP consistently shows it better than when I do it at home.

What does gwern or guzey think of this? I only trust them

”I’ve long found that tea makes me much less nervous than coffee, even with equal caffeine.”<p>Well, of course you are less nervous when you avoid taking coffee: it contains a LOT of beta-carbolines which act as MAO-A inhibitors. MAO-A inhibition directly prevents adrenalines from being inactivated by oxidation.

I finished one bottle of Theanine for occasional use and went to order a different combo as it was unavailable. It is Theanine Serene with Relora which also includes Magnesium, GABA, Taurine, and Holy basil in two large tablets. Helps relax and ease falling asleep.<p>Another option may be a pain&#x2F;stomach relief&#x2F;sleep aid concoction we found :<p>1tsp ginger<p>1tsp turmeric<p>1tsp cinnamon<p>1tsp fine black pepper<p>500ml milk<p>Boil for 10 minutes. Drink one cup warm and save the other for another day.