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Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

metasophi.com

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Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#11
post #10

I've taken L-theanine for anxiety before, and it seems to help. I'm not sure if it's a placebo or not, but either way it seems to help

Same here. I find that I am less likely to wake up in the middle of the night. Based on the post, my guess is that I'm less likely to wake up during REM from anxiety.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#12
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but you would really need to drink a lot of green tea to get the same amount of L-theanine you would in a supplement: "2.5 litres of brewed green tea would be needed to get 200mg of L-theanine". Also a question of how much dose you want of course...

And matcha tea?

That has a lot more L-theanine, but even then seems very variable so could be the same or way off.

For example, in one study "the final dose of 1 gram of Matcha green tea was taken on the testing day and contained only 12.4 mg of L- theanine." Source: https://www.ffhdj.com/index.php/DietarySupplementsNutraceuti...

Another study: "According to Kaneko et al., the content of l-theanine in matcha tea infusions amounts to 6.1 mg/L [50], while Unno et al. [9] found as much as 44.65 mg/g of that compound in matcha tea samples." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7796401/

I'm not sure, but I guess one would use around 4 grams of matcha in a cup? So then at the upper bound you would come close to 200mg. But matcha has a lot of caffeine so probably not suitable to improve sleep.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#14
I would have liked to have seen if there was any difference in the effects over time. I think it is easy to find something that helps with anxiety in the short term, but over enough time habituation, tolerance, and dependence can develop to most substances.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#15

> This study was not blinded so there could be a placebo effect. Saved you a click.

My view on this is if you don't find any effect or a tiny effect (the case here) that is already useful information. For most supplements, my bet is that you won't even benefit from a placebo effect.

And if you do find an effect, then you should do a more high-effort self-blinded test.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#16

I would have liked to have seen if there was any difference in the effects over time. I think it is easy to find something that helps with anxiety in the short term, but over enough time habituation, tolerance, and dependence can develop to most substances.

Yes, you are very right: this is something I will definitely add eventually.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#19
I once was sitting at my desk and had this overwhelming calm come over me. I was trying to figure out what I had eaten that morning/afternoon and then realized the 2-3 'Just Chill' sodas in my trash my mom had gotten me contained L-Theanine. Was a pretty blind test but I wasn't able to reproduce it effectively with L-Theanine supplements I found on amazon.

Re: Self-experiment with L-theanine: effect on sleep and cognition

#20
post #19

I once was sitting at my desk and had this overwhelming calm come over me. I was trying to figure out what I had eaten that morning/afternoon and then realized the 2-3 'Just Chill' sodas in my trash my mom had gotten me contained L-Theanine. Was a pretty blind test but I wasn't able to reproduce it effectively with L-Theanine supplements I found on amazon.

Very interesting: maybe it could have been something else in the sodas? Alternatively, the quality of the amazon supplement might not have been great (unless you tried from multiple sources)
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