How did you determine that they were trustworthy? Whatever process you used to evaluate their trustworthiness, use the same process on this article, and then decide whether you trust this article.
This article seems not bad, but I’m skeptical of the Dynomight author because he previously downplayed the recent rise in homelessness as just returning to 2011 levels. Newer data from late 2024 shows homelessness actually surged 18% to a record high, driven by housing costs, migration, and ending pandemic support - so his earlier analysis missed important trends.
That post (https://dynomight.net/homeless/) uses HUD's counts from January 2023. There's a long delay with these—the counts are done each year in January but usually only published in December. The January 2024 counts are now available and do indeed show much higher levels: A total of 771k on Jan 2024 as opposed to 653k in Jan 2023 or 582k in 2022. But that post was done in July 2024, when that data wasn't available yet. (And was, I hope, clear that it was using the Jan 2023 counts.)
This is good. If anyone wants to do a follow-up I’d like to see a higher dosage used, and I’d like to see the effect of weekly supplementation, eg each week you fill your pill-box either with vit-d or l-theanine and rate the week as a whole (with some blinding process). Finally interested in populations with high caffeine use.
If I had billg money, I’d divert some of it into just running high quality tests of all these “maybe” supplements.
Could we crowdfund to pay for this? My friend keeps wanting me to get into supplements (or into multi-level marketing selling supplements...) and I would definitely chip in a few dollars a month to prove whether the advertised claims were true.
TL;DR single test at best inconclusive but broadly said no evident benefit. Good randomisation but so many variables.
I am convinced the author is in a persisting out of body state.
Also, placebo is great!! I have reverse white coat syndrome, paying my GP attendance fee to have a nice doctor measure my BP consistently shows it better than when I do it at home.
Do you measure it in a chair similar to your doctor's office? I thought my couch was similar and I was careful to have my feet flat on the floor. But I "lowered by BP" by 10-15 by moving to the dining room table.
This is a self reported anecdata over many years. I do measure mainly on a couch, yes. Odd that reclining would be higher than sitting but I will try some variation. You'd think being more corpse like was net beneficial to BP
I finished one bottle of Theanine for occasional use and went to order a different combo as it was unavailable. It is Theanine Serene with Relora which also includes Magnesium, GABA, Taurine, and Holy basil in two large tablets. Helps relax and ease falling asleep.
Another option may be a pain/stomach relief/sleep aid concoction we found :
1tsp ginger
1tsp turmeric
1tsp cinnamon
1tsp fine black pepper
500ml milk
Boil for 10 minutes.
Drink one cup warm and save the other for another day.
If you're not careful and diligent, this is a recipe for liver damage from coumarin and heavy metal toxicity. You can take all those things safely but it requires knowledge and care.
Turmeric and cinnamon are both notorious for lead contamination.
In many locations it's legal to sell consumables that have disgustingly high ppm of heavy metals as long as the recommended daily dose is small so that the absolute amount of heavy metals stays below a fixed threshold. Also many companies just flagrantly violate the regulatory levels.
Getting clean turmeric extract is possible by knowing which brand to trust. Natural Factors is trustworthy, they are transparent with heavy metal testing and have third-party validation in academic studies and by consumerlab.com. But even if it's clean, you would still need to manage this risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK548561
For cinnamon, avoiding coumarin is possible by making sure it's ceylon cinnamon. But I don't know of any brand selling ceylon cinnamon that I would also trust to have low heavy metal levels. The intersection of reliable brands and ceylon cinnamon sellers is a very sparse set.
> The acute hepatotoxicity caused by turmeric appears to be due to an idiosyncratic injury, perhaps immunologically mediated.
idiosyncratic means they don't know why (because they're idios?), but it happens to some people for unknown reasons. The chances are very slim that you'll have whatever pre-condition to be affected by this.
Yeah, be careful, curry will poison you, that's why there's billions of people that eat curry on the planet regularly and they all died from liver poisoning.
but regarding theanine, i can't tell if it is useful for me, i bought it because of this thread's commentary. Sometimes it makes me jittery, and some times it doesn't, n=1, five trials so far ;-)
I bought the bottle so i'll take it. i really ought start writing down vibe/mood journals with a list of supplements i took that day, if any.
oh and i avoid taurine. I don't recall why, offhand; but i do, so i'll have to look into those other chemicals, i see "GABA" often - and you didn't specify what type of magnesium!
Weren't the "beneficial effects" of turmeric (or to curcumin, to be more exact) found to be based on fake research? The researcher who started the whole thing about turmeric, Bharat Aggarwal, had to retract 30 (!) of his papers, in which he falsified the images.
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.
Correct, this is why tea and especially ground tea leaves like matcha induce the feeling of focus for longer, they already naturally have higher levels of L-theanine with caffeine.
The theanine stimulates the NMDA receptors so it is possible that the glutamate you get from the Caffiene is not enough to stimulate your NMDA receptor. It might be that you are a fast metabolizer of Caffeine.
This has been my experience with it as well. It appears to regulate the spike of caffeine from coffee. I recall reading it had to do with an enzyme that helped the body process caffeine so it attentuates the effect of the stimulant. Whether that's true, I often take one with coffee. I've also experienced similar effects chasing my morning coffee with green tea.
The author was apparently not interested in that hypothesis. Why don’t you do a little self-experiment, now that a method has been laid out?
(Personally, I think the existing literature by itself should be more than enough to convince anyone that orally taken theanine most likely has no effect. The reason more scientists don’t explore theanine is probably because they don’t think it’s likely to produce an interesting result.)
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.
Im on the other side of the spectrum. With a small dose of caffeine I get really wired, my blood pressure rises, my head hurts, I feel stressed, anxious and I can’t sleep at night even if the coffee was in the morning. With matcha it’s a similar effect but it’s less anxiety and more headache.
Same story here - few sips of coffee and my heart starts pounding and I can't sleep at all. I have found a plant / drink called yerba mate to give me the beneficial effects without the anxiety though. No headache either. It's higher in caffeine than tea but lower than coffee. Everyone is different but for anyone else out there who gets acute anxiety from most caffeine but wants the focus boost I would recommend giving it a try.
have you tried a pre-workout style dose (it’s about 8-10 coffees in one)? The first time should give you a pretty good idea of what the “jittery” feeling is.
I googled some pre-workout and it seems to be about 200mg of caffeine, same as a can of Monster. I've drank 2 cans of Monster back-to-back a few times in my life and still not felt jittery.
I largely share experience with Kiro, I don't feel like caffeine makes me perk up at all really. I just drink Monster cause I love the flavor of some of them.
I have ADHD and caffeine very easily makes me jittery. Ordering my cappuccino 'half-caff' has terrifically improved my life. Stimulant medication, the kind prescribed by the doc, easily makes me jittery, too.
The narrative that 'stimulants calm down people with ADHD but make neurotypicals wired' never sat well with me. But I totally believe that it makes you and many other people calmer without any friction.
There must be a wide range of physiological causes and behavioral circumstances that lead to an ADHD diagnosis, such that people like me take a baby dose of methylphenidate or else I get paradoxically overstimulated and distractible and physically uncomfortable.
Or maybe my stimulant tolerance is unrelated to the ADHD and it's just enzymes. I think I had a flag for one of those SNPs that makes me sensitive to caffeine...
As I said, there are many exceptions. It is just a correlation.
There are people with ADHD for whom meds don't work at all, some for who it works in very low doses, some that need very high doses, everyone is different. Same with reactions to coffein.
Diversity is the norm in nature when talking about individuals. ADHD is super complex and how stimulants work is also super complex and the interactions, well we barely have any idea. It doesn't really say anything about your ADHD that you are more or less sensitive to stimulants other than that your are more and less sensitive to stimulants.
Like you wrote, it could be just some enzymes or whatever. Humans are just crazy complex. It is still useful to talk about fact that a statistically significant subset of people with ADHD react differently to caffeine than most neurotypicals.
For what it is worth, I envy you a lot being more sensitives. I can kill five, six, seven cups of coffee and not feel anything. It sucks.
My feeling is it either does nothing at a low does but does make me feel anxious when drinking, an uneasy feeling in my chest.
I don't have that problem with energy drinks (even it is the caffeine equivalent of something like 8 espressos) and tea (hasn't happened ever and I drink a lot of tea)
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.
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.
I enjoy caffeine but also take some medications that exacerbate the feelings of irritability/jitteriness when combined with caffeine - anecdotally, extended release theanine taken with my coffee alleviates it.
Glutamate is fascinating! The latest and greatest hypothesis for mood, learning, etc. hot off the press. Suddenly everything targets NMDA/AMPA receptors and increases plasticity
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.
It is strange to discuss L-theanine with vitamin D as one has nothing much to do with the other. It could've been better to compare L-theanine with a placebo (cellulose) which is how research conventionally works.
L-theanine at 200-300 mg before bed is extremely useful for canceling excessive caffeine while trying to sleep at night. Add piperine to the mix for possible further cancelation of caffeine. [PMID 35684048]
> It is strange to discuss L-theanine with vitamin D as one has nothing much to do with the other.
That's the idea, vitamin D was used as a placebo. They bought vitamin D supplements rather than cellulose because the supplier sold both L-theanine and vitamin D and the pills looked (nearly) identical.
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.
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.
> After ingestion, cholecalciferol is first converted to calcidiol in the liver, which can take several hours. Then, calcidiol is further converted to calcitriol, the active form, in the kidneys, which may take additional time.
read as if you're perfectly healthy, at minimum it's 24 hours. What you're talking about is probably placebo effect. For reserves to start building up to the point where your body has "enough" calcitriol, it takes weeks
* Is_Energetic = CalcitrolLevel > 90% of CalcitrolReserveCapacity
For most people, it will take days, weeks, or even months to come above 90%. But for those who have dipped just below 90%, such as to 89%, if they're optimally healthy in other ways, they will see a rapid rise in energy by high dose D3. If it's not this, then there is something else going on physiologically to explain the subjective effect.
What side effects? It promotes energy in just a few hours, so take it early in the day. Your link is not loading. Ensure you have sufficient calcium and magnesium as cofactors.
I tried it and it never did anything, I tried all sorts of CBD products as well (while in SF) and I never noticed a thing.
The only thing that worked was microdosing shrooms which I've done twice in SF. I felt very calm and had a lot of novel ideas during these two days. Would recommend trying. Never microdosed LSD.
My issue with dosing shrooms (micro or otherwise) is that I find myself building up tolerance extremely fast. Literally within a couple of days my tolerance of psilocybin shoots up so much that even doubled doses seem to have little effect. I then need to stop taking it for weeks or months before my tolerance drops back to baseline.
Does anyone else have this issue with shrooms? FWIW I believe I'm generally quite resistant to psychoactive substances having been treated with benzos for anxiety and depression and finding they did almost nothing to allieviate any symptoms. The curious thing was that despite being warned against their "incredible addictiveness" I was able to increase my dosage way beyond prescribed levels only to find out they still did nothing and then quit them cold turkey with no effect whatsoever. It was almost like swallowing sugar pills.
L-Theanine has a noticeable effect when I drink my morning coffee, it totally eliminates the jittery effects and smooths it out.
I've tried a lot of CBD products and some work VERY well (Feals, Soul) and some might as well be gummy bears (Cornbread Hemp). I generally disbelieve "internet" PR claims as well, but the two I mentioned are legit.
I'll eat 3 Feals gummies or 1 Soul "Out of Office" quad, and it rocks me. (M, 40's, 6', 170lbs).
> L-Theanine has a noticeable effect when I drink my morning coffee, it totally eliminates the jittery effects and smooths it out.
FWIW, the research on L-Theanine in conjunction with caffeine is the only research I've seen that seems convincing that L-Theanine has any effect. I've not seen any convincing evidence that it does anything in the absence of caffeine.
The thing is, if you're looking for an obvious effect like the classic psychedelics have, you're going to be disappointed with most mood treatments.
That doesn't mean they don't work--it might be because you didn't measure whether it worked effectively.
A lot of people (but not all people) say that exercise doesn't improve their mood, but when you ask them mood related questions when they aren't thinking about exercise, it becomes clear that exercise massively effects mood.
> If it has such a negligible effect then what's the difference with just taking a placebo? Might as well no?
Who said they were negligible? I didn't. I said you might not have measured the effects effectively. That doesn't mean they're negligible.
Anxiolytics generally have the problem that people notice/remember when they're anxious, but don't notice/remember when they're not anxious. As a result, when you track someone's anxiety attacks who is on an anxiolyitic, you might see, say, a 80% reduction in frequency, but that that person won't remember all the times they didn't have anxiety attacks, they remember the times they had anxiety attacks, and they may conclude that the anxiolytic didn't work if they weren't actually tracking carefully. Notably, there's a growing body of actual scientific research that CBD is effective for treating anxiety, but the effect you report, "It didn't do anything" is almost universal from people who try it.
Non-scientific "experimentation" with CBD is that a lot of people take it hoping to get high, and when it doesn't get them high, they conclude it has no effect. But in fact CBD does have effects, it just doesn't have the effects the self-experimenter was looking for.
Psychedelics have the opposite research problem: they very much do get you high. So people take it for some pretense like treating anxiety, and then when it gets them high, they believe it treated their anxiety whether it did or not, because at least it did something obvious.
I'm not saying psychedelics don't treat anxiety, I'm simply saying that self-experiments which don't attempt to control for these problems generally aren't very good proof of anything.
If you want my personal opinion, I think the evidence for CBD as an effective anxiolytic is stronger than the evidence for psilocybin as an anxiolytic, although I think both need more research to be conclusive.
Yeah I tried CBD as well. After a few days of being frustrated with the recommended doses, I gobbled the whole bottle (100€ or so worth of CBD), and absolutely nothing happened.
CBD works, but it needs to be high quality and if you're a stoner with crazy high tolerance probably you just won't feel it.
For sake of experiment, I recently acquired and vaped a good amount of CBD herb, and I was definitely high as a kite, though in a much different way than if it had been loaded with THC.
I was surprised that the author’s conclusion didn’t mention another model that looked consistent with the data: that theanine works slowly — over the course of a few days, not hours.
(I have no idea whether it would work like this. A placebo effect only is also consistent with the data.)
There's no need to invoke a placebo effect as an explanation for any of the results. He took it in response to acute stress, which is a local maximum in stress. The decrease in stress afterwards is to be expected.
Take a look at the stress vs day graph, though: it sure looks like stress was lower during that period. But maybe this is because the measurements were at a different time of day?
According to my doctor, Vitamin-D can be taken once a week or daily have the same long term effect. This matches up with 15 years of blood tests. (N=1)
Most of this stuff is just takes from random people, not medical research. For example, the article links to 5-month old HN thread where the first comment says:
> And you do not want to mess with the 5-HTP and alcohol at the same time
so I googled it
> Internet forums are full of horror stories of people vomiting, blacking out or having seizures after drinking while on 5-HTP. It’s impossible to know if the stories are reliable, but there is little other evidence of known interactions between 5-HTP and alcohol.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the plural of anecdote is data. Phenomena exists before the related studies do.
The link you provided goes on to say:
> Antidepressants also affect the balance of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Popular antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors increase levels of serotonin in the brain. The labels of SSRIs such as Celexa and Prozac warn patients not to drink alcohol while on the drugs. If you shouldn’t drink with antidepressants, you probably shouldn’t drink with 5-HTP.
> The effects of mixing 5-HTP and alcohol on serotonin levels are not fully understood. However, both substances alter serotonin levels, which may increase the risk of developing serotonin syndrome. This life-threatening condition is caused by the accumulation of too much serotonin in the body. Serotonin syndrome can cause confusion, agitation, sweating, coordination loss, fever and seizure.
Nah, the plural of anecdote is confirmation bias. Why do people keep trotting out this "plural of anecdote is data" line, is it a quote from some high-profile idiot?
Of course data can also give you confirmation bias, maybe that's the point, maybe that's why people defend anecdotes. What you have to do to find out if something is really happening is reason about it, then test your theories by doing your best to knock them over. Often though we just end up testing for statistical correlation without any better theory than "these two things go together". In that case, the plural of anecdote is bad methodology. The best thing I can say about anecdotes is that they might give you ideas.
Edit: found it, it's due to one Ray Wolfinger, behavioral political scientist: When a student once categorized one of Wolfinger’s claims as “just anecdotal,” he paused for an expectant second, dropping a copy of Robert Dahl’s “Who Governs” onto his seminar table as he replied, “The plural of anecdote is data.” His quip, emphasizing that statistics represent human stories, would become a well-known aphorism throughout the field. Well this probably shouldn't be taken literally and I suspect the criticism of his claim was fair.
> Nah, the plural of anecdote is confirmation bias. Why do people keep trotting out this "plural of anecdote is data" line, is it a quote from some high-profile idiot?
It is standard Bayesian reasoning[1]. But it requires independence between observations, which many people forget!
The things people say aren't truly independent, even when they are. Like when Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke wrote novels with the same plots at the same time, they were working independently, but they weren't culturally independent.
Besides, even if several people independently assert "tying a ribbon to a wishing tree cured my warts", that's not an explanation of what actually took place. If repeated observations with unbiased instruments confirm this, then there's something wrong with the instruments (or something), until you have an explanation.
(But saying things like that usually prompts people to bring up cosmology or particle physics or other fields where we really do have to resort to saying "the measurements say it's happening, we'll have to assume it's happening" without understanding much.)
You might be missing the forest for the trees. Anecdotal evidence does not make a proper study, but, to quote myself "phenomena exists before the related studies do."
Oftentimes we (humans) use imperfect, but well-known, figures of speech to convey common ideas.
Most of social media and most of real life have absolutely insane takes on health-related stuff. Ask someone at random about, say, keto, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get an opinion without any data behind it.
I think that part of this is because the effect sizes are so small. Grabbing some arbitrary sources, if you look at the average disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to colorectal cancer as a result of red meat consumption in France[0] and put them into per-person terms, it averages out to a grand total of...less than 2 hours per person (presumably other causes also contribute). Meanwhile, for alcohol consumption and everything it causes, the average Australian is losing a little under 20 hours (and I assume most of HN lives in a country where this is similar).
These are pretty small numbers! I'm honestly not sure whether it's even worth worrying about them. No wonder people have trouble telling what's true in a field where many of the papers and most of the personal experience is just noise in the data.
It's what you get when you have a forum entirely made up of people who have never been told that they are actually wrong trying to apply knowledge to something that doesn't give clear, immediate, and universal results
D's effect on mood is well known so yea. They said slow acting but.. well I dunno. Felt like a bad pick. They should have got empty caps and filled them with chalk.
Good to see such experimentation, especially when the person conducting the experiments takes the results with a grain of salt. I was first exposed to supplements when I started lifting seriously, a decade ago. Man oh man, some people go crazy on supplements in that space, literally wasting hundreds of dollars every month, for years. And in the end the only three things that seem to do anything for lifters are: whey protein, creatine, and ZMA (Zinc/Magnesium/B6). I did waste quite a bit of money as well until I looked at the actual evidence.
And of course, the ones that come from the end of a needle.
If most supplements actually worked, a pharma company would analyze it and reformulate it to get a patent, and then you'd hear about it on commercials.
Yeah. But I never took any of the steroid stuff. I only compete with my former self. Not being able to throw 400lbs overhead is fine. I also want to be able to walk when I'm old.
Ironically Now Foods L-theanine used to be a variant of a special extraction method named Suntheanine but that’s no longer the case, probably due to cost.
I’ve had good luck with the Suntheanine brands. GNC brand has been effective for me. YMMV.
This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don't have time and energy to make it right now. I'd pay $25 a month or more.
Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenient to run multiple at once if that's possible.
I'm not interested in generalizing, I just want to know if (for example) taking Vitamin D every day at 1000 iu is enough, or whether I should be taking more or less. I can get labs done on this, of course, but again I'm more interested in subjective wellbeing than blood levels beyond avoiding deficiency or hypervitaminosis.
Maybe such an app exists and I simply don't know about it.
While not exactly the same https://examine.com/ is doing this sort business and seems to be popular. They aggregate and meta analyze research for pills like L-Theanine and people pay $30/month to access it
you want a service to: mail out a 30-pack of daily pills, there's an app where you record your mood/whatever, and then at the end of it, reveal which days were VitD and which was collagen?
>how do you blind the contents of the pills unless someone else does it?
My idea ( you need to adapt the numbers)
1 you build say 30 paper small bags
2 you then get 15 pills of vitamins/drug you test and 15 of placebo , you need them to be similar in shape/color
3 you put the pills in bags and make two piles, say on left side you have the vitamin and right side you have the placebo
4 you make a script to generate 30 long code numbers , you print the codes and stick them on the bags(or use a pen), my idea is that even if you now see that the code you are sticking on the bag, since it will be some long code you should forget it, or have someone else stick the codes . You save the code nubmers in a file, the first 15 codes are the medicine the last 15 the placebo
5 each day you take a bag, open, take the pill and record the code on the bag
I've been thinking the same thing! The app should have protocol templates for whatever intervention I'm testing, what outcomes I should track, and what confounds might be. And if it isn't part of the templates, help me develop the protocol, including being able to set what level of confidence I want. It should tell me what actions I should take to improve confidence (e.g. bloodwork). It should hide the results from me until the overall intervention is complete.
All the other health apps and tracking systems I've seen are operating at one level of abstraction too low (just the data itself and its direct insights), or try to find patterns from p-hacking passive signals (it looks like when you work out you sleep better, did you know your HRV is 1.1 higher when you do [unrelated thing]). There's no buy-in or sense of direction in these products, no pushing me to do more to acquire data, no laser focus on a targeted test / intervention.
I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. There aren’t templates yet but you can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2]. I think you have a point about sense of direction and premade templates being targeted and useful. Reflect is very much generic and untargeted.
I think this is an awesome idea. You get two boxes of daily pills labelled A and B, you take A for a month then take B for a month, and log your feelings throughout. At the end the service reveals which month was Vit D (or whatever) and which wasn't.
I guess you could get your partner or a friend or family member to do it for you?
While this is a wonderful idea in theory, a key reason it's often not used for experiments is that there are just too many variables to control for (including, for example, the ongoing effects of spending a month wondering if you're taking something that's affecting you... which affects you in and of itself).
I agree it's not perfect, you're right to cite the Hawthorne effect. The vitamin D one for example would be affected by weather and seasonality. But I still think it would be really cool and a good product.
I’m actually working on this now, starting with sleep quality and cognitive performance (memory/attention/fluency) as dependent variables.
The vision is to have an index of protocols that people can try for themselves and see whether and how broader claims apply to their own minds and bodies.
If you or anyone else is interested, please send me an email at camhashemi (at) gmail.com. I’m looking for early adopters!
> 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 ~25 mg per cup
It's not uncommon for a substance to have different, even opposite effects at different doses. For example high dose melatonin can keep you up, and stress you out, whereas in most people you only need up to 1 mg to promote sleep.
I would also look at other ingredients in teas as a knock on effect vs straight supplement extracts. Sometimes the extract as a supplement isn’t the same once separated from the rest of the plant it’s found.
That's certainly an interesting thing I wish we knew more about. My qualitative experience is that coffee gives me more anxiety than any other form of caffeine I've tried, including ones that don't contain L-theanine.
One obvious one to consider is the diterpenes in filtered vs unfiltered brewing methods. Filtered methods will remove most of these. Diterpenes will help reduce inflammation and may enhance the flavor of the coffee for some, but the ones in coffee are unfortunately also linked to increased LDL (bad cholesterol), so as a drug choice, there's not a clear winner in whether filtered or unfiltered coffee (as in French press, for example), will result in a better black coffee.
From my own anecdotal experience, lower inflammation has a wide variety of cognitive benefits, regardless of the means, while things that increase my inflammatory response (for example, allergies), make it much harder to think clearly.
Side notes: I don't drink milk so can't speak to the lipids that might further influence intake. But even the heat of coffee will have an effect: if it's scalding hot, some of the caffeine will be absorbed in the mouth, and if it's very cold, it'll wind its way further through your system before being absorbed.
I'm just a coffee drinker, so take all of this information with a grain of salt, unless your sodium is too high? Caveat emptor
One proven property of tea (especially green tea prepared at a slightly lower temperature) is that it increases arterial flexibility. Contrast that with coffee, which increases blood pressure. I wouldn't be surprised if the effects on the cardiovascular system plays a large role in the calming effect of teas, and the anxiety-increasing effect of coffee.
Which leads to my other point: these experiments always focus so much on the brain without taking into account that the state of the body has a profound impact on the brain too.
I have a strange relationship with psilocybin where microdoses reliably give me an almost unbearable headache, but a large dose will reliably get rid of a headache (even a migraine in one case).
I haven’t tested it in many years (boring parent mode engaged) but that was my first experience with bizarre dose response relationships where one effect was very acutely inverted.
It took me months to figure out the source of headaches. I felt certain it couldn’t be the psilocybin because it was so good at fixing my headaches prior to that. Sure enough, I could turn the headaches on and off like a switch by taking a tiny dose or not taking it.
I wonder if it has something to do with different receptor activity at low vs. high levels. Must have been frustrating trying to figure that out, though!
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?
I am the same way. I cannot even eat chocolate before bed or I am up all night.
I have Bipolar Disorder with an Anxiety Disorder and drinking coffee triggers a lot of paranoid manic thoughts as well.
But Tea is even worse for me, because, I think, of the theanine. I think I am very sesitive to Glutamate and really glad the blogger talks about it. It is one of the most under utilized neurotransmitters in psychiatry.
Also, cutting out foods with some certain additives helped me as well. Like isolated pea protein, autolyzed yeast extract, and malted barley flour to name a few. Theyare all flavor enhancers that contain glutamate.
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.
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.
That's true, but melatonin is probably not a very representative example, (unless you're only talking about sleep) as its mechanism is really idiosyncratic.
It seems (from [1]) that the body has a day-clock which is synchronised to the actual day by the release of melatonin. Taking melatonin (at the right time) reinforces the signal; taking too much swamps it completely. It seems unlikely that many other body chemicals are part of the signal chain of a biological PLL (phase-locked loop).
My high school chemistry teacher claimed that tea and coffee each have different isomers of caffeine and people may be sensitive to one both or none. This was pre internet and some quick googling seems to debunk this claim in that caffeine has no isomers. Though the same searching seems to indicate that there is a likelihood other compounds mitigate or exacerbate its effects.
Good article. It demonstrates the necessity of rigorous clinical trials for therapeutic approval. It’s a very long and arduous process to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a new drug is effective.
Love the methodology and the thoughtful analysis long term in-depth trial.
I'm actually working on a project very similar to this. It's related to self testing and doing correlation analysis for all types of nutritional supplements. Thanks for sharing
>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 consume, yet when you read studies, giving people 400 mg of caffeine (~4 cups of coffee) delays sleep by 30 minutes or so. That's not why you lay awake hours, likewise nothing you get over the counter fixes your anxiety.
These things are crutches and attachments people take (or avoid) to try to control anxiety, which makes it worse. The solution to this isn't turning yourself into a laboratory, which is very common behavior.
> 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 likely related to increased sympathetic activity.
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.
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?
I've been using L-Theanine for a over a year now and then and it definitely has effects!
I use it mostly for sleep 100-150mg in combination of 5HTP which I found it to be an incredible sleep cocktail. I generally don't have trouble sleeping but this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9. Unsurprisingly, l-theanine is popular in lucid dreaming communities and while I have no particular interest lucid dreaming my dreams are definitely more vivid and most importantly instantly forgettable (like normal dreams are) which is the most desirable outcome imo.
250+mg does have my mind racing a bit and this dose will prevent me from falling asleep effectively (at body weight of 75kg), anything above 200mg seems too much imo for my body weight. So I think the effect is very much observable just through dose variability.
For day use I've tried l-theanine with caffeine in the morning and I'd say the effect is similar to mild adhd medication (I've been told it compares to like ~2mg of Ritallin or pinch of Kratom powder). Tho for me it always comes with side effects similar to a cup of too much coffee would have. I found that just like adhd medicine, it works best with a protein shake.
This is my unscientific anecdote, tho OP's post makes me want to record my own experiences.
Not to put too fine a point on it but if there are blind trials showing no effect and non-blind trials showing an effect, my conclusion would be the effect is a placebo.
I've tried different L-Theanine supplements, and there's definitely a difference in quality across companies... which could help explain the variance in experiences.
Unfortunately, there isn't much regulation for supplements in general. Some companies do 3rd party purity testing, though it's not always the case.
That's a reasonable take but still depends on the trials. E.G. if the blind trial was 20 college age Americans males, and the non-blind trial was 1000 people from various ages and countries, I'd probably lean towards trusting the non-blind trials (unless I happened to be a college age American male).
Or if all the available trials are n<=20, I'll probably lean towards trusting the anecdotes, at least enough to try the supplement for myself.
When it comes to cheap-to-produce supplements, very limited trial data is the norm, unfortunately. There's no money for running large trials.
It’s almost as if this post is attempting to gaslight the world into thinking that L-Theanine doesn’t work. It’s the exact equivalent of saying “Look at the data, LSD does not make you hallucinate, it’s just conjecture. Look at my data and numbers.”
This entire post makes me think there is either an ulterior motive for writing it to try and discredit the obvious impact L-Theanine has on people, or, the write up is simply an irresponsible take on trying to show that one used data to prove something as false which is unequivocally true, at least for some.
Nonetheless, L-Theanine profoundly impacts some people and others it has no effect on. This post should have language that makes it clear that the results are from one single person who has one single experience which is extremely divergent relative to others who have experienced the life changing effects of L-Theanine.
Without such qualifying language this post seems grossly irresponsible and misleads the reader into thinking there is no effect that L-Theanine has.
That’s fair, however the overall gist of the post seems to imply that the numbers data and numbers produced somehow groundbreakingly prove that everyone who has proclaimed it works is wrong and the data and numbers in the post prove that.
Happy to be told I’m wrong, but that’s how I read it.
Very little if anything is ever proven to be absolutely true in all circumstances. The author did a decent job of controlling variables and blinding so their evidence for a lack of effect is substantially more robust than any number of personal anecdotes claiming an effect.
We’ve known for centuries now that people are absolutely terrible at knowing if medical interventions work beyond placebo unless you use rigorous protocols to remove bias and account for reversion to the mean. Yet it seems the message just doesn’t get through to vast swathes of otherwise intelligent people.
What makes you think it is trying to gaslight anyone? The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility, but also fairly points out that there are other studies with more participants that weren't really promising either. It then suggests that those who do really believe it works on them also replicate a blinded self-experiment, which seems pretty fair to me - because then surely they'd be able to show results, if they're one of the (apparently many many) people whom it works for.
I also think/thought L-Theanine works for me, and since it's not harmful I'll keep taking it, but at this point I accept that it's likely just placebo effect until shown otherwise.
Placebo is such a curious thing. If you can prove to yourself that your effects are placebo-effects, then those effects should disappear, because you no longer believe in them.
So if it's working for you, you probabaly should NOT start a study to find out if it works or not. It might stop working (for you). What good would that do?
I am hoping my level of self-delusion would be strong enough. When I was a kid and wanted to play sick to get out of school, I'd always quickly develop an actual low-grade fever and begin feeling legitimately sick. Even after I noticed the pattern, it still happened.
I'm hoping I can use this power of deception against myself with L-Theanine if I were to run this kind of study (but, maybe fortunately, have no motivation to do so at this point).
It may have something to do with what we say to ourselves inside our heads. If we say something to ourselves it is kind of believing. We believe what we think, we believe what we say. We can of course change our thoughts later. Like when you started feeling sick but when there was no more need for the symptoms, you could say "I'm no longer sick at all" :-)
> The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility,
This is my hypothesis. I'm very confident it worked for me, but I'm guessing that there's a certain combination of symptoms and traits that it's effective. If it was a placebo for me, it would be literally a miracle: likely the cheapest thing I've tried and had the biggest effect without requiring me to make a habit out of taking it.
> t this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9.
You take it for sleep but you sleep less? I think you mean you take it for "fun sleep".
Theanine is excitatory, that is wht it acts like ritalin for you, which is also excitatory. Period. Which is why at higher doses your mind races. Theanine brings me into psychois becasue I am sensitive to glutamate and I have Bipolar Disorder. Drinking tea give me paranoia and the "fun sleep" you have I have every night.
”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.
How do you define "a LOT"? the only estimate I can find says there's 210mcg/L of beta-carbolines. Mainly harman and norharman, which have a binding affinity for MAO-A of 220nM and 2200nM respectively(lower is more potent). Not earth-shatteringly potent. These compounds have a fairly short half-life and they're reversible.
Doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the potency of MAO inhibition used in psychiatric or entheogenic contexts. I'd be reluctant to attribute too many noticable effects to them.
It is known they have a significant effect when consumed together with a weak stimulant, like caffeine or nicotine. Tobacco smoke is another significant source in the human diet.
Interesting. Do you have a source on this? I can't seem to find any detailed data on this. Only some suggestions that since they're lipophilic, and are found in higher concentrations in brain tissue, they might accumulate there. I can't find any research analyzing whether they do accumulate in brain tissue and how long they stay there.
Note that 210 mcg/L is 210 ng/milliliter. The molecular weight of norharman is 168.2 g/mol, so the concentration is about 1250 nM/L.
Coupled with frequency of coffee intake and accounting for storage in adipose tissue, levels in vivo could easily exceed binding affinities after just days or weeks of coffee use.
It's a bit disappointing that Vitamin D was used as a control, since based on my research, Vitamin D does seem to have very significant effects on mood. Author says:
> Vitamin D might have some effects on mood, but no one seems to claim that they’re acute, that you’d feel them within an hour.
As far as I remember, this is correct, which is to say, I've never read anything that claimed the effects of vitamin D were acute. However, this seems like it still leaves a pretty big gap to me: you're taking a known mood-altering substance and basically hoping that the effects aren't acute because nobody has bothered to test whether they are or not.
That said, this is a minor complaint, and this test is far more scientific than the vast majority of self-experiments.
For a community that prides itself on critical thinking, I'm always surprised to see HN lap this sort of pseudoscientific witch-doctor stuff up.
This poorly-controlled, N=1 experiment tells you nothing, not even about the author.
There's absolutely no reason to consider these novice self-experiments when professional scientific experiments are available (unless you're hunting for a specific result).
The author directly quoted the European Food Safety Authority, who found the same thing he did. There's a rich history of self-experimentation in medicine and nutrition, I don't think you need to be so negative.
My point was that no data gleaned from this experiment would've been meaningful, regardless of the result, because it was not conducted very rigourously.and on a sufficiently large scale.
Oh come on! Studies about supplements over time are almost always "poorly controlled" because you have to ask people to do something while living their lives.
Also, N=1 experiments can absolutely be interesting and give us ideas for further study, even if they don't say anything about a population.
Uh, I think the article itself is fine. Not the most rigorous science, but not too bad for an amateur.
But the comments on HN, on the other hand... Every single post about medicine or disease is full of anecdote upon anecdote and pseudoscience. It's really hard to tell the difference between HN and Reddit in this regard.
The most insane part is that people here are so eager to jump on the train and recommend random treatments to others when they've only vaguely described their problem. I never understand this.
People invented and discovered remarkable things before modern statistics and RCTs (work on puerperal fever, antisepsis and germ theory stand out for me). Humans can make surprising progress with only small scale experimentation and observation.
I prefer the results of large studies. I think modern methods are better than methods from the Scientific Revolution. But people can't always afford to wait a decade or two for solidly replicated results.
I suspect that the placebo effect can be very strong in anxiety situations.
And on top of pure placebo. The whole rite of going to the kitchen and prepare your little pill has a calming effect in itself.
And maybe matcha is the same. Its preparation is slow and requires attention.
Much like smoking, it’s difficult to know how much of the calm it provides come nicotin or from slower/deeper breathing, just going outside and talking to strangers.
I have chronic insomnia that is turning severe, so I really want to believe these things work, but so far, they’re all very pricey and completely useless on sleep.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadIf I had billg money, I’d divert some of it into just running high quality tests of all these “maybe” supplements.
I am convinced the author is in a persisting out of body state.
Also, placebo is great!! I have reverse white coat syndrome, paying my GP attendance fee to have a nice doctor measure my BP consistently shows it better than when I do it at home.
Another option may be a pain/stomach relief/sleep aid concoction we found :
1tsp ginger
1tsp turmeric
1tsp cinnamon
1tsp fine black pepper
500ml milk
Boil for 10 minutes. Drink one cup warm and save the other for another day.
In many locations it's legal to sell consumables that have disgustingly high ppm of heavy metals as long as the recommended daily dose is small so that the absolute amount of heavy metals stays below a fixed threshold. Also many companies just flagrantly violate the regulatory levels.
Getting clean turmeric extract is possible by knowing which brand to trust. Natural Factors is trustworthy, they are transparent with heavy metal testing and have third-party validation in academic studies and by consumerlab.com. But even if it's clean, you would still need to manage this risk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK548561
For cinnamon, avoiding coumarin is possible by making sure it's ceylon cinnamon. But I don't know of any brand selling ceylon cinnamon that I would also trust to have low heavy metal levels. The intersection of reliable brands and ceylon cinnamon sellers is a very sparse set.
idiosyncratic means they don't know why (because they're idios?), but it happens to some people for unknown reasons. The chances are very slim that you'll have whatever pre-condition to be affected by this.
Were any of the downvotes and responses related to the Theanine with relora pill for stress relief?
but regarding theanine, i can't tell if it is useful for me, i bought it because of this thread's commentary. Sometimes it makes me jittery, and some times it doesn't, n=1, five trials so far ;-)
I bought the bottle so i'll take it. i really ought start writing down vibe/mood journals with a list of supplements i took that day, if any.
oh and i avoid taurine. I don't recall why, offhand; but i do, so i'll have to look into those other chemicals, i see "GABA" often - and you didn't specify what type of magnesium!
I wish the author had spent time addressing that theory specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMDA_receptor
(Personally, I think the existing literature by itself should be more than enough to convince anyone that orally taken theanine most likely has no effect. The reason more scientists don’t explore theanine is probably because they don’t think it’s likely to produce an interesting result.)
I largely share experience with Kiro, I don't feel like caffeine makes me perk up at all really. I just drink Monster cause I love the flavor of some of them.
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't get jittery.
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.
The narrative that 'stimulants calm down people with ADHD but make neurotypicals wired' never sat well with me. But I totally believe that it makes you and many other people calmer without any friction.
There must be a wide range of physiological causes and behavioral circumstances that lead to an ADHD diagnosis, such that people like me take a baby dose of methylphenidate or else I get paradoxically overstimulated and distractible and physically uncomfortable.
Or maybe my stimulant tolerance is unrelated to the ADHD and it's just enzymes. I think I had a flag for one of those SNPs that makes me sensitive to caffeine...
There are people with ADHD for whom meds don't work at all, some for who it works in very low doses, some that need very high doses, everyone is different. Same with reactions to coffein.
Diversity is the norm in nature when talking about individuals. ADHD is super complex and how stimulants work is also super complex and the interactions, well we barely have any idea. It doesn't really say anything about your ADHD that you are more or less sensitive to stimulants other than that your are more and less sensitive to stimulants.
Like you wrote, it could be just some enzymes or whatever. Humans are just crazy complex. It is still useful to talk about fact that a statistically significant subset of people with ADHD react differently to caffeine than most neurotypicals.
For what it is worth, I envy you a lot being more sensitives. I can kill five, six, seven cups of coffee and not feel anything. It sucks.
How do you treat your ADHD then?
I don't have that problem with energy drinks (even it is the caffeine equivalent of something like 8 espressos) and tea (hasn't happened ever and I drink a lot of tea)
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.
L-theanine at 200-300 mg before bed is extremely useful for canceling excessive caffeine while trying to sleep at night. Add piperine to the mix for possible further cancelation of caffeine. [PMID 35684048]
That's the idea, vitamin D was used as a placebo. They bought vitamin D supplements rather than cellulose because the supplier sold both L-theanine and vitamin D and the pills looked (nearly) identical.
Taking vitamin D once, right before bed will do nothing. Our bodies don't use it that way.
Cholecalciferol = weeks
calcidiol = hours
read as if you're perfectly healthy, at minimum it's 24 hours. What you're talking about is probably placebo effect. For reserves to start building up to the point where your body has "enough" calcitriol, it takes weeks
* CalcitrolLevel: float
* CalcitrolReserveCapacity: float
* Is_Energetic: bool
Imagine the following equation:
* Is_Energetic = CalcitrolLevel > 90% of CalcitrolReserveCapacity
For most people, it will take days, weeks, or even months to come above 90%. But for those who have dipped just below 90%, such as to 89%, if they're optimally healthy in other ways, they will see a rapid rise in energy by high dose D3. If it's not this, then there is something else going on physiologically to explain the subjective effect.
I have been trying to increase my Vitamin D levels for 15 years now but I just can't tolerate this supplement.
I tried following most advice over here in the past but it did not work: https://vitamindwiki.com/Vitamin+D+Cofactors+in+a+nutshellI'll just live with my low blood Vitamin D levels.
The only thing that worked was microdosing shrooms which I've done twice in SF. I felt very calm and had a lot of novel ideas during these two days. Would recommend trying. Never microdosed LSD.
Does anyone else have this issue with shrooms? FWIW I believe I'm generally quite resistant to psychoactive substances having been treated with benzos for anxiety and depression and finding they did almost nothing to allieviate any symptoms. The curious thing was that despite being warned against their "incredible addictiveness" I was able to increase my dosage way beyond prescribed levels only to find out they still did nothing and then quit them cold turkey with no effect whatsoever. It was almost like swallowing sugar pills.
I've tried a lot of CBD products and some work VERY well (Feals, Soul) and some might as well be gummy bears (Cornbread Hemp). I generally disbelieve "internet" PR claims as well, but the two I mentioned are legit.
I'll eat 3 Feals gummies or 1 Soul "Out of Office" quad, and it rocks me. (M, 40's, 6', 170lbs).
FWIW, the research on L-Theanine in conjunction with caffeine is the only research I've seen that seems convincing that L-Theanine has any effect. I've not seen any convincing evidence that it does anything in the absence of caffeine.
I imagine you know this, but you do realize both of those products have THC, right?
Calling them "CBD products" is a bit misleading, even though they do also have CBD.
That doesn't mean they don't work--it might be because you didn't measure whether it worked effectively.
A lot of people (but not all people) say that exercise doesn't improve their mood, but when you ask them mood related questions when they aren't thinking about exercise, it becomes clear that exercise massively effects mood.
I've never met anyone who think exercise doesn't make them feel good on the other hand
Who said they were negligible? I didn't. I said you might not have measured the effects effectively. That doesn't mean they're negligible.
Anxiolytics generally have the problem that people notice/remember when they're anxious, but don't notice/remember when they're not anxious. As a result, when you track someone's anxiety attacks who is on an anxiolyitic, you might see, say, a 80% reduction in frequency, but that that person won't remember all the times they didn't have anxiety attacks, they remember the times they had anxiety attacks, and they may conclude that the anxiolytic didn't work if they weren't actually tracking carefully. Notably, there's a growing body of actual scientific research that CBD is effective for treating anxiety, but the effect you report, "It didn't do anything" is almost universal from people who try it.
Non-scientific "experimentation" with CBD is that a lot of people take it hoping to get high, and when it doesn't get them high, they conclude it has no effect. But in fact CBD does have effects, it just doesn't have the effects the self-experimenter was looking for.
Psychedelics have the opposite research problem: they very much do get you high. So people take it for some pretense like treating anxiety, and then when it gets them high, they believe it treated their anxiety whether it did or not, because at least it did something obvious.
I'm not saying psychedelics don't treat anxiety, I'm simply saying that self-experiments which don't attempt to control for these problems generally aren't very good proof of anything.
If you want my personal opinion, I think the evidence for CBD as an effective anxiolytic is stronger than the evidence for psilocybin as an anxiolytic, although I think both need more research to be conclusive.
For sake of experiment, I recently acquired and vaped a good amount of CBD herb, and I was definitely high as a kite, though in a much different way than if it had been loaded with THC.
I would assume that you got high from the THC
(I have no idea whether it would work like this. A placebo effect only is also consistent with the data.)
This was my experience. I'm not sure if that's "typical", although I've never really tried to take it like that.
Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical/biological things.
> And you do not want to mess with the 5-HTP and alcohol at the same time
so I googled it
> Internet forums are full of horror stories of people vomiting, blacking out or having seizures after drinking while on 5-HTP. It’s impossible to know if the stories are reliable, but there is little other evidence of known interactions between 5-HTP and alcohol.
https://www.drugrehab.com/addiction/alcohol/risks-of-mixing-...
The link you provided goes on to say:
> Antidepressants also affect the balance of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Popular antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors increase levels of serotonin in the brain. The labels of SSRIs such as Celexa and Prozac warn patients not to drink alcohol while on the drugs. If you shouldn’t drink with antidepressants, you probably shouldn’t drink with 5-HTP.
> The effects of mixing 5-HTP and alcohol on serotonin levels are not fully understood. However, both substances alter serotonin levels, which may increase the risk of developing serotonin syndrome. This life-threatening condition is caused by the accumulation of too much serotonin in the body. Serotonin syndrome can cause confusion, agitation, sweating, coordination loss, fever and seizure.
Of course data can also give you confirmation bias, maybe that's the point, maybe that's why people defend anecdotes. What you have to do to find out if something is really happening is reason about it, then test your theories by doing your best to knock them over. Often though we just end up testing for statistical correlation without any better theory than "these two things go together". In that case, the plural of anecdote is bad methodology. The best thing I can say about anecdotes is that they might give you ideas.
Edit: found it, it's due to one Ray Wolfinger, behavioral political scientist: When a student once categorized one of Wolfinger’s claims as “just anecdotal,” he paused for an expectant second, dropping a copy of Robert Dahl’s “Who Governs” onto his seminar table as he replied, “The plural of anecdote is data.” His quip, emphasizing that statistics represent human stories, would become a well-known aphorism throughout the field. Well this probably shouldn't be taken literally and I suspect the criticism of his claim was fair.
It is standard Bayesian reasoning[1]. But it requires independence between observations, which many people forget!
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/bayes-rule-odds-form
Besides, even if several people independently assert "tying a ribbon to a wishing tree cured my warts", that's not an explanation of what actually took place. If repeated observations with unbiased instruments confirm this, then there's something wrong with the instruments (or something), until you have an explanation.
(But saying things like that usually prompts people to bring up cosmology or particle physics or other fields where we really do have to resort to saying "the measurements say it's happening, we'll have to assume it's happening" without understanding much.)
Oftentimes we (humans) use imperfect, but well-known, figures of speech to convey common ideas.
I think that part of this is because the effect sizes are so small. Grabbing some arbitrary sources, if you look at the average disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to colorectal cancer as a result of red meat consumption in France[0] and put them into per-person terms, it averages out to a grand total of...less than 2 hours per person (presumably other causes also contribute). Meanwhile, for alcohol consumption and everything it causes, the average Australian is losing a little under 20 hours (and I assume most of HN lives in a country where this is similar).
These are pretty small numbers! I'm honestly not sure whether it's even worth worrying about them. No wonder people have trouble telling what's true in a field where many of the papers and most of the personal experience is just noise in the data.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption
If most supplements actually worked, a pharma company would analyze it and reformulate it to get a patent, and then you'd hear about it on commercials.
Unless you lived in a normal country where marketing pharmaceuticals direct to consumers is -- of course -- banned.
I’ve had good luck with the Suntheanine brands. GNC brand has been effective for me. YMMV.
Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenient to run multiple at once if that's possible.
I'm not interested in generalizing, I just want to know if (for example) taking Vitamin D every day at 1000 iu is enough, or whether I should be taking more or less. I can get labs done on this, of course, but again I'm more interested in subjective wellbeing than blood levels beyond avoiding deficiency or hypervitaminosis.
Maybe such an app exists and I simply don't know about it.
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/?show_conditions=tr...
how much would you pay for this?
My idea ( you need to adapt the numbers)
1 you build say 30 paper small bags
2 you then get 15 pills of vitamins/drug you test and 15 of placebo , you need them to be similar in shape/color
3 you put the pills in bags and make two piles, say on left side you have the vitamin and right side you have the placebo
4 you make a script to generate 30 long code numbers , you print the codes and stick them on the bags(or use a pen), my idea is that even if you now see that the code you are sticking on the bag, since it will be some long code you should forget it, or have someone else stick the codes . You save the code nubmers in a file, the first 15 codes are the medicine the last 15 the placebo
5 each day you take a bag, open, take the pill and record the code on the bag
All the other health apps and tracking systems I've seen are operating at one level of abstraction too low (just the data itself and its direct insights), or try to find patterns from p-hacking passive signals (it looks like when you work out you sleep better, did you know your HRV is 1.1 higher when you do [unrelated thing]). There's no buy-in or sense of direction in these products, no pushing me to do more to acquire data, no laser focus on a targeted test / intervention.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...
I guess you could get your partner or a friend or family member to do it for you?
The vision is to have an index of protocols that people can try for themselves and see whether and how broader claims apply to their own minds and bodies.
If you or anyone else is interested, please send me an email at camhashemi (at) gmail.com. I’m looking for early adopters!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
It's not uncommon for a substance to have different, even opposite effects at different doses. For example high dose melatonin can keep you up, and stress you out, whereas in most people you only need up to 1 mg to promote sleep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8601035/
From my own anecdotal experience, lower inflammation has a wide variety of cognitive benefits, regardless of the means, while things that increase my inflammatory response (for example, allergies), make it much harder to think clearly.
Side notes: I don't drink milk so can't speak to the lipids that might further influence intake. But even the heat of coffee will have an effect: if it's scalding hot, some of the caffeine will be absorbed in the mouth, and if it's very cold, it'll wind its way further through your system before being absorbed.
I'm just a coffee drinker, so take all of this information with a grain of salt, unless your sodium is too high? Caveat emptor
Which leads to my other point: these experiments always focus so much on the brain without taking into account that the state of the body has a profound impact on the brain too.
I haven’t tested it in many years (boring parent mode engaged) but that was my first experience with bizarre dose response relationships where one effect was very acutely inverted.
It took me months to figure out the source of headaches. I felt certain it couldn’t be the psilocybin because it was so good at fixing my headaches prior to that. Sure enough, I could turn the headaches on and off like a switch by taking a tiny dose or not taking it.
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.
I have Bipolar Disorder with an Anxiety Disorder and drinking coffee triggers a lot of paranoid manic thoughts as well.
But Tea is even worse for me, because, I think, of the theanine. I think I am very sesitive to Glutamate and really glad the blogger talks about it. It is one of the most under utilized neurotransmitters in psychiatry.
Also, cutting out foods with some certain additives helped me as well. Like isolated pea protein, autolyzed yeast extract, and malted barley flour to name a few. Theyare all flavor enhancers that contain glutamate.
I think we humans just really really like ritualistic practices.
It seems (from [1]) that the body has a day-clock which is synchronised to the actual day by the release of melatonin. Taking melatonin (at the right time) reinforces the signal; taking too much swamps it completely. It seems unlikely that many other body chemicals are part of the signal chain of a biological PLL (phase-locked loop).
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
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 consume, yet when you read studies, giving people 400 mg of caffeine (~4 cups of coffee) delays sleep by 30 minutes or so. That's not why you lay awake hours, likewise nothing you get over the counter fixes your anxiety.
These things are crutches and attachments people take (or avoid) to try to control anxiety, which makes it worse. The solution to this isn't turning yourself into a laboratory, which is very common behavior.
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 likely related to increased sympathetic activity.
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.
So the reason for lying awake at night can also be affected by your genetics I guess?
I use it mostly for sleep 100-150mg in combination of 5HTP which I found it to be an incredible sleep cocktail. I generally don't have trouble sleeping but this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9. Unsurprisingly, l-theanine is popular in lucid dreaming communities and while I have no particular interest lucid dreaming my dreams are definitely more vivid and most importantly instantly forgettable (like normal dreams are) which is the most desirable outcome imo.
250+mg does have my mind racing a bit and this dose will prevent me from falling asleep effectively (at body weight of 75kg), anything above 200mg seems too much imo for my body weight. So I think the effect is very much observable just through dose variability.
For day use I've tried l-theanine with caffeine in the morning and I'd say the effect is similar to mild adhd medication (I've been told it compares to like ~2mg of Ritallin or pinch of Kratom powder). Tho for me it always comes with side effects similar to a cup of too much coffee would have. I found that just like adhd medicine, it works best with a protein shake.
This is my unscientific anecdote, tho OP's post makes me want to record my own experiences.
Unfortunately, there isn't much regulation for supplements in general. Some companies do 3rd party purity testing, though it's not always the case.
This could also be explained by placebo effects.
Or if all the available trials are n<=20, I'll probably lean towards trusting the anecdotes, at least enough to try the supplement for myself.
When it comes to cheap-to-produce supplements, very limited trial data is the norm, unfortunately. There's no money for running large trials.
This entire post makes me think there is either an ulterior motive for writing it to try and discredit the obvious impact L-Theanine has on people, or, the write up is simply an irresponsible take on trying to show that one used data to prove something as false which is unequivocally true, at least for some.
Nonetheless, L-Theanine profoundly impacts some people and others it has no effect on. This post should have language that makes it clear that the results are from one single person who has one single experience which is extremely divergent relative to others who have experienced the life changing effects of L-Theanine.
Without such qualifying language this post seems grossly irresponsible and misleads the reader into thinking there is no effect that L-Theanine has.
That’s my interpretation, at least!
Happy to be told I’m wrong, but that’s how I read it.
We’ve known for centuries now that people are absolutely terrible at knowing if medical interventions work beyond placebo unless you use rigorous protocols to remove bias and account for reversion to the mean. Yet it seems the message just doesn’t get through to vast swathes of otherwise intelligent people.
I also think/thought L-Theanine works for me, and since it's not harmful I'll keep taking it, but at this point I accept that it's likely just placebo effect until shown otherwise.
So if it's working for you, you probabaly should NOT start a study to find out if it works or not. It might stop working (for you). What good would that do?
I'm hoping I can use this power of deception against myself with L-Theanine if I were to run this kind of study (but, maybe fortunately, have no motivation to do so at this point).
This is my hypothesis. I'm very confident it worked for me, but I'm guessing that there's a certain combination of symptoms and traits that it's effective. If it was a placebo for me, it would be literally a miracle: likely the cheapest thing I've tried and had the biggest effect without requiring me to make a habit out of taking it.
You take it for sleep but you sleep less? I think you mean you take it for "fun sleep".
Theanine is excitatory, that is wht it acts like ritalin for you, which is also excitatory. Period. Which is why at higher doses your mind races. Theanine brings me into psychois becasue I am sensitive to glutamate and I have Bipolar Disorder. Drinking tea give me paranoia and the "fun sleep" you have I have every night.
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.
Doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the potency of MAO inhibition used in psychiatric or entheogenic contexts. I'd be reluctant to attribute too many noticable effects to them.
It is known they have a significant effect when consumed together with a weak stimulant, like caffeine or nicotine. Tobacco smoke is another significant source in the human diet.
If it was weeks, they would accumulate to very toxic levels in anyone who smokes or has a few cups of coffee a day.
Your second point is spot on.
Coupled with frequency of coffee intake and accounting for storage in adipose tissue, levels in vivo could easily exceed binding affinities after just days or weeks of coffee use.
> Vitamin D might have some effects on mood, but no one seems to claim that they’re acute, that you’d feel them within an hour.
As far as I remember, this is correct, which is to say, I've never read anything that claimed the effects of vitamin D were acute. However, this seems like it still leaves a pretty big gap to me: you're taking a known mood-altering substance and basically hoping that the effects aren't acute because nobody has bothered to test whether they are or not.
That said, this is a minor complaint, and this test is far more scientific than the vast majority of self-experiments.
This poorly-controlled, N=1 experiment tells you nothing, not even about the author.
There's absolutely no reason to consider these novice self-experiments when professional scientific experiments are available (unless you're hunting for a specific result).
Yet people have been saying all over the internet it's working.
The burden of the proof is on those who claim the opposite of the vast majority of scientist studies.
Beside, N=1 studies is still better than some nobody on the internet claiming it works when he did nothing to negate the placebo effect.
Also, N=1 experiments can absolutely be interesting and give us ideas for further study, even if they don't say anything about a population.
But the comments on HN, on the other hand... Every single post about medicine or disease is full of anecdote upon anecdote and pseudoscience. It's really hard to tell the difference between HN and Reddit in this regard.
The most insane part is that people here are so eager to jump on the train and recommend random treatments to others when they've only vaguely described their problem. I never understand this.
I prefer the results of large studies. I think modern methods are better than methods from the Scientific Revolution. But people can't always afford to wait a decade or two for solidly replicated results.
And on top of pure placebo. The whole rite of going to the kitchen and prepare your little pill has a calming effect in itself.
And maybe matcha is the same. Its preparation is slow and requires attention.
Much like smoking, it’s difficult to know how much of the calm it provides come nicotin or from slower/deeper breathing, just going outside and talking to strangers.
I have chronic insomnia that is turning severe, so I really want to believe these things work, but so far, they’re all very pricey and completely useless on sleep.