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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#121

Post by AlecSchueler »

brandonasuncion wrote: post #111
mastax wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to put too fine a point on it but if there are blind trials showing no effect and non-blind trials showing an effect, my conclusion would be the effect is a placebo.

I've tried different L-Theanine supplements, and there's definitely a difference in quality across companies... which could help explain the variance in experiences. Unfortunately, there isn't much regulation for supplements in general. Some companies do 3rd party purity testing, though it's not always the case.

> I've tried different L-Theanine supplements, and there's definitely a difference in quality across companies...

This could also be explained by placebo effects.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#122

Post by gloxkiqcza »

baby wrote: post #12

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. The only thing that worked was microdosing shrooms which I'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.

Try Hericium (also called Lion's Mane). It’s a mushroom with nootropic effects without the psychoactive ones. Supplement pills are freely available.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#123

Post by steve_adams_86 »

TimByte wrote: post #118
pazimzadeh wrote: post #48

> 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 ~2…

That's a great point. Dose-response relationships can be really weird

I have a strange relationship with psilocybin where microdoses reliably give me an almost unbearable headache, but a large dose will reliably get rid of a headache (even a migraine in one case).

I haven’t tested it in many years (boring parent mode engaged) but that was my first experience with bizarre dose response relationships where one effect was very acutely inverted.

It took me months to figure out the source of headaches. I felt certain it couldn’t be the psilocybin because it was so good at fixing my headaches prior to that. Sure enough, I could turn the headaches on and off like a switch by taking a tiny dose or not taking it.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#125

Post by galaxyLogic »

drakonka wrote: post #103
chesterche wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if this post is attempting to gaslight the world into thinking that L-Theanine doesn’t work. It’s the exact equivalent of saying “Look at the data, LSD does not make you hallucinate, it’s just conjecture. Look at my data and numbers.” This entire post makes me think there is either an ulterior motive for writing it to try and discredit the obvious impact L-Theanine has on people, or, the write up is si…

What makes you think it is trying to gaslight anyone? The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility, but also fairly points out that there are other studies with more participants that weren't really promising either. It then suggests that those who do really believe it works on them also replicate a blinded self-experiment, which seems pretty fair to me - because then surely they'd…

Placebo is such a curious thing. If you can prove to yourself that your effects are placebo-effects, then those effects should disappear, because you no longer believe in them.

So if it's working for you, you probabaly should NOT start a study to find out if it works or not. It might stop working (for you). What good would that do?

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#126

Post by mg »

This is great. The author defines their own metrics, is doing their own A/B tests and publishes their interpretation plus the raw data. Imagine a world where all health blogging was like that.

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:

https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking

I also built a bunch of tooling to analyze the data.

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.

So I really applaud the author for conducting this and especially for providing the raw data.

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.

Let's look at the author's interpretation. Personally, I find that part a bit short.

They calculated 4 p-values and write:

    Technically, I did find two significant results.
I wonder what "Technically" means here. Are there "significant results" that are "better" than just "technically significant results"?

Then they continue:

    Of course, I don’t think this
    means I’ve proven theanine is harmful.
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?

It's great that they offer the raw data. I look forward to taking a look at it later today.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#127

Post by padjo »

chesterche wrote: post #97
rplnt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title says "my experiment", it couldn't be any clearer and open it's about a single person's experience.

That’s fair, however the overall gist of the post seems to imply that the numbers data and numbers produced somehow groundbreakingly prove that everyone who has proclaimed it works is wrong and the data and numbers in the post prove that. Happy to be told I’m wrong, but that’s how I read it.

Very little if anything is ever proven to be absolutely true in all circumstances. The author did a decent job of controlling variables and blinding so their evidence for a lack of effect is substantially more robust than any number of personal anecdotes claiming an effect.

We’ve known for centuries now that people are absolutely terrible at knowing if medical interventions work beyond placebo unless you use rigorous protocols to remove bias and account for reversion to the mean. Yet it seems the message just doesn’t get through to vast swathes of otherwise intelligent people.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#128

Post by gloxkiqcza »

Barrin92 wrote: post #57

>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? 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'd know by now and all of Asia would be anxiety free. Insomniacs will usually do the reverse, they'll say manically monitor every bit of caffeine they…

Caffeine sensitivity varies widely, as does sensitivity to most substances.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#129

Post by padjo »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #125
drakonka wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it is trying to gaslight anyone? The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility, but also fairly points out that there are other studies with more participants that weren't really promising either. It then suggests that those who do really believe it works on them also replicate a blinded self-experiment, which seems pretty fair to me - because then surely they'd…

Placebo is such a curious thing. If you can prove to yourself that your effects are placebo-effects, then those effects should disappear, because you no longer believe in them. So if it's working for you, you probabaly should NOT start a study to find out if it works or not. It might stop working (for you). What good would that do?

Placebo only works on self perception though. If there are objective markers of disease they don’t tend to respond to placebo effects at all.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#130

Post by aszantu »

Can for myself just say I took the anime for a while but don'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'm also mixing with cocos cream and cows milk.
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