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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

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Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#351

Post by yard2010 »

strontian wrote: post #317
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…

nice! I recently got dust mites out of my home completely, and it was a miraculous upgrade to my health, including several symptoms that are outside the definitions of allergic asthma/eczema/rhinitis. One important thing people are missing about dust mite allergy is the many ways in which they directly damage your immune system and body, outside of the usual frame of "allergies" which is based on type 2 hypersensitiv…

I have to write this here it might help someone: I had the worst case of mite allergy since childhood - no smells let alone no breathing from my nose. 5 years ago I started immunotherapy - my good dr basically injected me with the allergen every week for 1-2 years. After that, I got a monthly injection with the max dosage for like a year. I haven't had this allergy ever since. I can smell again and breathe from my nose. My dr has healed this awful disease.

Modern medicine sometimes works like magic. If you have this disease know that you don't have to suffer this bs. Try to fix it with the help of your dr.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#352

Post by not_a_bot_4sho »

cardanome wrote: post #223
Kiro wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have ADHD? Most neurotypical people seem to experience jittery effects and being extremely alert while for people with ADHD it can actually make them sleepy. Of course everyone's brain is different, it is just a correlation with many exceptions. So yeah, caffeine works differently on different people. Personally, as someone with ADHD, I have a crazy caffeine tolerance. It helps me somewhat with focus but I don…

I do.

I think there's another dimension of temporal tolerance to consider.

There have been times in my life where I consumed a lot of caffeine, and it brought on the paradoxical sleepy effect.

And other times where I tried to eliminate caffeine, and a fallen-off-the-wagon strong dose gets me jittery, but acclimation happens in 24-48 hours.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#353

Post by Barrin92 »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #105
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…

> when you read studies, giving people 400 mg of caffeine (~4 cups of coffee) delays sleep by 30 minutes or so. I'll need to see those studies. I'm finding the reverse: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805807/ > One study examining the sleep effects of 400 mg caffeine administered 30 minutes before bedtime demonstrated both severe sleep disruption as well as important cardiovascular effects during sleep like…

You can go down to the Table 2 of the study you linked and see that's pretty much exactly the data they got (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805807/table/T2/)

Going from 7.8 to 7 hours and taking 50 instead of 20 minutes to fall asleep is significant for the purposes of this study, but that's not what insomniacs and anxiety patients talk about. Insomniacs who lie awake until 4 in the morning and get 3 hours of sleep routinely because they're so worried by the cup of coffee they had or the supplement they forgot don't do so because they have a physiological reaction to some caffeine, it's a mental problem.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#354

Post by gs17 »

grvbck wrote: post #315

While this may not be a perfectly executed study, the "N=1 trial" part is not the problem. There have been numerous medical and scientific studies with N=1, known as N-of-1 trials. These trials are very useful in chronic conditions where symptoms are stable and measurable, allowing for multiple crossover periods to assess treatment effects accurately. Also…don't forget all the medical discoveries based on self-experi…

>Werner Forssmann performed the first heart catheterization on himself. He got the Nobel prize.

In case anyone else was confused how it would be possible to perform heart surgery on yourself, he did it through a vein in his arm, which is still incredibly impressive:

>In 1929, he put himself under local anesthesia and inserted a catheter into a vein of his arm. Not knowing if the catheter might pierce a vein, he put his life at risk. Forssmann was nevertheless successful; he safely passed the catheter into his heart.

He also had to trick the operating-room nurse into thinking he was operating on her.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#355

Post by andix »

In my experience most pharmaceuticals and nutrients are rather well researched, and the results of scientific studies can be trusted most of the times.

So if most studies don't show a significant improvement, the substance just doesn't work. It's even the opposite, just because a study showed some improvement over a bigger population, it doesn't mean it works for you, or the improvement is noticeable to you.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#356

Post by sgc »

levocardia wrote: post #344
robwwilliams wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because.... >While I was blinded during each trial, I saw the theanine/D result when I wrote it down. Over time I couldn’t help but notice that my stress dropped even when I took vitamin D, and that I was terrible at predicting what I’d taken That is not blinding

I would have taken a well-calibrated photo of the cup each time without looking, maybe with a color card in the bottom, and only entered results at the end of the trial.

Given that there is no documentation of whether the events during the hour of test time were more or less stressful than those before it, and no taking the time of day, diet and exercise, sleep, location (quiet island or next to a construction site), etc into account, the data seems useless.

As a note, I have no idea why he bothered trying to guess what he had taken. What possible value could that have in this type of experiment?

Perhaps the correct course of action would be to ask for feedback in the design phase of an N=1 trial, especially a longer one, to avoid some basic mistakes.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#357

Post by throwup238 »

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…

> Why do you say unblinded?

It’s unblinded because the subject is preparing the concoction under study. There is no way they can create a blind experiment if they’re the ones preparing the control. The placebo effect is nothing if not pernicious and cunning, able to exploit even the most subtle psychological signal - like minuscule differences in the amount of powder in a capsule.

Blinded studies have independent doctors prepare and dispense the candidate drug so they know whether its the real thing or a placebo, but their patients dont. In double blinded studies, neither the doctor nor the patient have any idea about what they’re getting because a third party prepares the drugs.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#358

Post by cortesoft »

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…

N=1 trial is great if you are trying to figure out what works for you as an individual

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#359

Post by seabass-labrax »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #274
grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a mattress encasement, it's like a HEPA filter bag for the mattress (cuts off the mites food supply and preventing allergens becoming airborne). Skips the whole trying to clean porous foam problem.

Ok. What do you put between the plastic and the sheets? A standard mattress cover? Won’t the mites just go there as that’s where the dead skin, etc will be? The plastic would also trap heat between me and it.

As someone who uses a plastic mattress cover I can answer your question: yes, if you let dust build up, mites can and do start to live on the fitted sheet that you put around the mattress cover. However, it is of course easier to wash just the fitted sheet than to remove dust from within a mattress, so I think that a cover is still beneficial.

I'm not sure what you mean by trapping heat - once there are two normal cotton fitted sheets around it, I don't feel the plastic mattress cover at all.

Re: My 16-month theanine self-experiment

#360

Post by pjot »

gs17 wrote: post #354
grvbck wrote: post #315

While this may not be a perfectly executed study, the "N=1 trial" part is not the problem. There have been numerous medical and scientific studies with N=1, known as N-of-1 trials. These trials are very useful in chronic conditions where symptoms are stable and measurable, allowing for multiple crossover periods to assess treatment effects accurately. Also…don't forget all the medical discoveries based on self-experi…

>Werner Forssmann performed the first heart catheterization on himself. He got the Nobel prize. In case anyone else was confused how it would be possible to perform heart surgery on yourself, he did it through a vein in his arm, which is still incredibly impressive: >In 1929, he put himself under local anesthesia and inserted a catheter into a vein of his arm. Not knowing if the catheter might pierce a vein, he put h…

Through the arm, I believe, is still the way it’s performed today!
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