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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#301

Post by tiborsaas »

Kiro wrote: post #166
AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #6

From 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.

I don't understand what people refer to when they say "jittery effects". I don't feel anything when taking caffeine, no matter the dose. Or I want to think it helps me wake up but the effect is so small that I can't be sure. It's basically just a ritual for me.

I got my teeth whitened and I was forbidden to drink coffee for a week or so. I thought the same that coffee was just a ritual for me, but apparently I got really weird (moody, annoyed easily) when going cold turkey, so I had to go to the pharmacy and buy caffeine tablets :) That settled it for me, that coffee does have and effect on me despite not feeling these "jittery effects" as well.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#302

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

mg wrote: post #264
bosie wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can use vim via termux, which is nice when you already have things in version control.

Alternatively, may I suggest the DailyLog app in F-Droid?

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#303

Post by tomrod »

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…

Aye. Completely agree. Path dependence matters, which is why you can't just look at pre/post action.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#304

Post by luqtas »

luqtas wrote: post #238
K0balt wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens science used to be much more common and there were several publications initially built around the concept. Unfortunately, the idea has all but been obliterated by inadequate public education and the chronic lack of time that now embattles the middle classes.

fortunately* citzen science was replaced by solid methods... this is a long fancy self reported post on a metric that is easily figured out by biomarkers (stress levels). what's the consequences if the author decided to make some claim about a substance?

couldn't edit but here it's how science measure stress: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8434839/

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#305

Post by danielbln »

Aurornis wrote: post #287

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 concernin…

Their microdosing experimentation was questionable. Not methodically, it was quite thorough, but iirc they used unknown strength street blotters and derived all further experimentation from that.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#306

Post by hombre_fatal »

davidanekstein wrote: post #212

If anyone is interested in running their own self guided experiments, I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. We got in the top 3 on ProductHunt not too long ago [2], and I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [3]. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638... [2] https://www.producthu…

Does your app make you randomize the when you do the intervention you’re tracking?

If not then almost everything you track is just a proxy for something else like how someone might only take melatonin on nights they knew they were going to sleep badly, or read in bed on nights they were already feeling good, not stressed.

Or they only take their meme supplements on days they aren’t stressed out by other things in life that make you neglect yourself, so the meme pills always correlate with good things.

It’s a major problem with Whoop’s insights feature. It needs a way to make you coin flip an intervention to be useful.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#307

Post by Jerrrrrry »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #244
quijoteuniv wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The strawman sentiment of "no medication ever" is a pretty easy take to herald against.

The nuanced truth is that our medical industry is flawed; since most illnesses are defined by their set of apparent symptoms (with most root causes not fully understood) the standard approach is to treat "symptoms" with medicines with sides effects rivaling the original ailment!

What if the lack of proper diet ('proper' varies wildly with populations), drugs/alcohol, sleep, stress, and exercise were the originating cause? Rushing to the medication treatment without fixing those vitals first eliminates the opportunity.

Our bodies have much more adaptive self-healing resilience properties innate to our species development than our own species hubris seems to acknowledge. And most people severely underestimate the importance big four.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#308

Post by OutOfHere »

freedomben wrote: post #24
OutOfHere wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be very careful targeting NMDAr/AMPAr directly. I made this mistake. Those receptors are extremely prone to causing permanent damage due to excitotoxicity.

If you are willing to share more about your story, I'd love to hear it. Did you cause permanent damage? What were you using and how much? What are the symptoms like now?

Yes, it 100% caused permanent damage in me due to an interaction of the agonist with an unrelated stimulant. After years, I ultimately stumbled upon the combination of memantine+telmisartan which successfully reversed much of the damage. I still have issues with things that I cannot physically tolerate due to the leftover damage. Also, I tried other things like valproate that failed to fully reverse the damage, but caused significant permanent problems of their own. To make a long story short, use gentle safe indirect promoters for NMDA/AMPA like L-glutamine and at most phosphatidylserine, but nothing stronger or more low-level. Leave the direct agonism for the rodent studies.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#309

Post by floatrock »

After reading a few paragraphs about theanine and dopamine and all the other amino acids, anyone else get to

> Examine is an independent website that’s respected for summarizing the scientific literature on health and supplements

and read that website name as "exa-meen"?

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#310

Post by ninetyninenine »

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_…

>Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.

The entire blog post was anecdotal.

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