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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#281

Post by OutOfHere »

genewitch wrote: post #41
OutOfHere wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitamin D3 is not a placebo at all. It 100% promotes energy quite quickly even though it takes much longer for the body to convert it to the active form. Also, its mental effect is distinctly different from that of L-theanine, like day and night. For these reasons, it's not a great candidate for comparison with L-theanine.

Unless it's the active D vitamin, it takes weeks to convert it into reserves. Taking vitamin D once, right before bed will do nothing. Our bodies don't use it that way. Cholecalciferol = weeks calcidiol = hours

The conversion period strongly depends on the input dose and on available cofactors. Numerous people have reported that 5000 IU of vitamin D3 can produce energy benefits in just a few hours if one has been skipping taking it. If one is low on cofactors, or takes a low dose of D3, then I imagine it taking days or even longer as you noted.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#282

Post by amelius »

riedel wrote: post #251
grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #138

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. 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't have too many issues during the day. I was allergic to my bed. B…

Antihistamines could even work without any allergy since they are typically used as mild sleeping aids. They are also used often off-label for stress reduction. [0] [0] https://fherehab.com/learning/surprising-antihistamine-anxie...

> Prolonged use can lead to increased tolerance, reduced effectiveness, and potential side effects.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/should-i-worry-...

> Theoretically, these drugs might increase the risk of dementia by blocking a particular brain neurotransmitter or increasing brain inflammation. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that these pills might increase the risk of dementia, while other studies have found no risk. And all the studies are inherently flawed.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#283

Post by altcognito »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #213
mg wrote: post #126

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_…

This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in muc…

Why do you say pseudo blinding, it seems like it is blind in that the author doesn’t know if he is taking the test or not.

Now you can argue that there isn’t enough time between samples, or he needs more subjects but he was blind to whether he was taking it that day or not.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#284

Post by dworkr »

pnm45678 wrote: post #266

> I think these are the possibilities: > Theanine works, but I got fake theanine. 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.

[dead]

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#285

Post by MichaelDickens »

pnm45678 wrote: post #266

> I think these are the possibilities: > Theanine works, but I got fake theanine. 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.

OP took 200 mg. Tea contains 5–20 mg and people commonly report beneficial effects from tea. If 5 mg is enough for some people then surely 200 mg would be enough for anyone?

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#286

Post by tudorconstantin »

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: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16141543/

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#287

Post by Aurornis »

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.

His experiments with magnesium showed negative results: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#experiment-1

He tried LSD microdosing when the internet was convinced it was a miracle, but found no benefit and some concerning negative effects: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics#lsd-microdosing

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.

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 work 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.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#288

Post by FigurativeVoid »

davedx wrote: post #270
FigurativeVoid wrote: post #269

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.

Sure it does. Did you read the article?

I did.

The article makes no claims about dreams or the relationship between dreams and sleep quality.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#289

Post by Aurornis »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #138

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. 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't have too many issues during the day. I was allergic to my bed. B…

> Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth

I would suggest people look for this symptom first before jumping onto nasal corticosteroids.

Fluticasone and others have low systemic absorption and low side effects in theory, but there are several studies that found some suppression of the HPA axis similar to taking small doses of oral corticosteroids like prednisone. The effect is small, but I wouldn’t suggest trying it out as a 1-month experiment unless you have specific symptoms of stuffy nose in the mornings.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#290

Post by jrootabega »

robwwilliams wrote: post #221
matthewdgreen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in muc…

Complete injustice to this lovely study. Why do you say unblinded? Why do you insult a time series study as “dressing up with lots of data”? Would you rather see less data? Or are you volunteering to be test subject #2? Show us how to do it right Dr. M.! In my opinion this is an exemplary N=1 study that is well designed and thoughtfully executed. Deserve accolades, not derision. And the author even recognizes possibl…

If he said unblinded at some point, it could have been because the study author looked into the cup to determine which substance had been taken too soon. The subject should have had no knowledge of what was taken until the entire 16-month trial was over.

We should avoid extreme polarization of our judgments in general. The study deserves some amount of praise for things it did somewhat well (like the method of blinding which is clever, but not applicable to everyone), and criticism for things it did not do well, such as designing your own study methodology for your own mood. That alone will affect the results. Simply RUNNING an experiment can affect your mood because it's interesting (or even maybe frustrating). The subject probably felt pride and satisfaction whenever they used their pill selection technique, which could improve mood on its own. Neither accolades nor complete derision are appropriate, although trying to claim too strong a result from this study is kinda deserving of derision if you claim to be science-minded.

The study was well-meaning and displayed cleverness.

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