”I’ve long found that tea makes me much less nervous than coffee, even with equal caffeine.” 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.
Or maybe it doesn't actually make him less nervous, in which case the beta-carbolines are irrelevant.
Of course. MAO A/B producing gene variants (including high- and low-activity VNTRs and even complete deletion) are some of the most varied in humans.
Your self-tracking syntax looks neat. How do you track if you are not in front of a computer?
I write into a text file on my phone. And later move those lines into the file on my computer. It's a bit cumbersome, but not too much. But yeah, I look forward to when I finally get around to writing an app for it.
do you use an app and shortcuts (or something similar) to speed this up?
I think is great that folk self observe, and that is a key to a lot, everyone ought to find what works for themselves, however there is a tendency to want to fix things with pills. There is a fundamental error there, if successful you might damp your symptoms but then you start a Whac-A-Mole (whac-a-symptom) but you are not looking at the root. The problem will come in another form. Have you consider that the symptom…
I’m not sure if this is your intention, but I take issue with the implication that “pills” (aka “medication” and “medicine,” “pills” has a generally negative connotation) aren’t often the solution to the root problem. It is great if you can solve things with diet, mindfulness, etc. But sometimes you need medical intervention and yes sometimes that means you need to take medication in the form of pills. There are mill…
This is good point, thank you, lot of people needs medicine, and i am glad they are accesible. My point goes more towards this: Imagine someone runs a marathon everyday, after a couple of months, start experiencing pain and inflammation. Do they need painkillers or do they need to ask themselves why they are running a marathon everyday? I am not against taking some painkillers as long as you also ask yourself the question. Do i really need to run a marathon everyday? I do not want to cure disease with yoga, no, but you should give it a go, whatever works for you, self observe, train a bit, walk in the forest, surf, meditate. Wellbeing cannot be achieved only with medicine.
I write into a text file on my phone. And later move those lines into the file on my computer. It's a bit cumbersome, but not too much. But yeah, I look forward to when I finally get around to writing an app for it.
do you use an app and shortcuts (or something similar) to speed this up?
On the phone I don't.
In Vim, I use multiple shortcuts that I made for this use case.
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…
A problem I see is that you can never be sure that it also works for other people. Just because one person reacts to a specific treatment does not mean that people on average react to the treatment in the same way. That’s the problem of having a sample size of 1. In other words: We cannot say much about whether the effect generalizes to a larger population from knowing that it has an affect on just one person.
It’s very possible that some things can be good for one person and not for another. Should we only ever have drugs that can help everyone?
I’d add one more possibility: “Theanine works but I need a higher dosage to feel the effect.”
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.
Yeh I've thought about whether it'd be possible/safe to use something like an "overclocked" electric blanket to sterilize the mattress daily. They also need humidity (~50% RH), hence why I got the dehumidifer, which has definitely knocked them back.
I got the exact same idea sadly most electric blanket i could find on amazon where kinda small and had disappointingly low heating power...
Pretty much my conclusion as-well.
I guess they just don't want folks giving themselves burns during sleep.
AliExpress as always is tempting [1], but you'd have to be incredibly careful about regulating temperature [2] and adding safety interlocks that'd make falling asleep with it active, or forgetting to turn it off impossible.
> 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…
I read a study about athletes given either a strong coffee, placebo, or a caffeine in capsule form. The study suggested that even if coffee had less caffeine than athletes got directly in a capsule (and measured in their blood) strong coffee boosted their performance more. This suggests that we might be getting a boost from sensing strong flavor by our receptors. Not sure how else to interpret it, but I really wish there would be more studies on this.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams. Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams. That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.