I'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'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.
My 16-month theanine self-experiment
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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#172Great 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 reve…
I like this idea! To build on it, the schedules could be non-random (systematic with random offset) and test combinations of substances in a way that maximises information both in the cases where substances are independent and when they have suspected interactions.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#173>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…
AFAIK studies on caffeine effects can be “polluted” by the fact that many humans (e.g. ~32% of europeans) have a variation on the CYP1A2 enzyme expression which makes them metabolize caffeine much slower (about 1/4th the speed) than the rest (allele C vs AA carriers).
So the reason for lying awake at night can also be affected by your genetics I guess?
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the issue is that an experiment with 1 person can’t prove much because you can’t have a control group. Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects. You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later. Excelle…
An experiment of 1 person can very well produce useful data. It depends on the setup of the experiment. Imagine an experiment where a person's thumb gets randomly hit with either a hammer or a feather once per day. And they then subjectively rate the experience. After 1000 days of collecting data, I doubt that we would wrongly come to the conclusion that the hammer treatment leads to the nicer outcome. The setup of t…
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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#175This 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_…
> 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?
I think what the author is saying is that for them to bother with theanine on a permanent basis, it would have to have shown an effect large enough to be apparent just from plotting.
In other words, they mean technical significance as opposed to clinical significance. A small effect can be statistically verifiable without being meaningful in practice.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
About ten years ago both my wife and I had to switch to extremely low caffeine coffee because we would get panic attacks. It still happens now, just this week we were accidentally served caffeinated coffee at breakfast diner and both were having panic attacks by 4pm. It's absolutely wild that I can drink a mug of a beverage that everyone else drinks by the liter but be crippled with anxiety. Brain chemistry is weird.
Do you not think it’s interesting that if affects both of you the same way, as far as to cause panic attacks in both of you? For an individual I could just about accept that it’s just how you react to caffeine, but the fact both you and your partner have the same result suggests some sort of influence on each other?
Assortative mating. Partners' genetics are not independent.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#177From the discussions I'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. I wish the author had spent time addressing that theory specifically.
"The journalist effect" is at play here.
When you're a professional in a field or having deep insight of something, and then a journalist comes by, does a 5 minute write-up or it and misses almost every point of it but have such a cocksure presentation, backed by a big corporate media name, that a hundred year later an urban myth will persist based on the journalists hatchetjob, while ignoring every significant facet that enthusiasts spent lifetimes on refining.(Okay it's a little bit tempered by the length and efforts of the experiment, but for an n=1 monostudy I feel this presents itself with more certainty than it should)
So henceforth in all realms of the web, Theanin will be an inert compound.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#178Got pretty powerful anxiety effect from it after taking it a while. Definitely not for me.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#179> 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…
Coffee and tea are very interesting. I can drink caffeinated tea without any issues. But for some reason caffeinated coffee will trigger an acne break out several days later. It took a long time for me to connect this link.
Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
#180There's a great podcast by Andrew Huberman on dopamine I listened to last week where he discusses theanine at the end. It's a fantastic (but 3 hour long) primer[0] for anyone wanting to learn more.
[0] https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/controlling-your-dopamin...