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:
I also built a bunch of tooling to analyze the data.
I think that mankind could greatly benefit from more people doing randomized studies on their own. Especially if we find a way to collectively interpret the data.
So I really applaud the author for conducting this and especially for providing the raw data.
Reading through the article and the comments here on HN, I wish there was more focus on the interpretation of the experiment. Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.
Let's look at the author's interpretation. Personally, I find that part a bit short.
They calculated 4 p-values and write:
Technically, I did find two significant results.
I wonder what "Technically" means here. Are there "significant results" that are "better" than just "technically significant results"?
Then they continue:
Of course, I don’t think this
means I’ve proven theanine is harmful.
So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?
It's great that they offer the raw data. I look forward to taking a look at it later today.
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 much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.
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 possible improvements.
Unlike most large high N clinical trials this is a high resolution longitudinal trial, and it is perfectly “controlled” for genetic difference (none), well controlled for environment, and there is only one evaluator.
Compare this to the messy and mostly useless massive studies of human depression reviewed by Jonathan Flint.
I think social media discussions of science would be better informed by the concept of a ‘hierarchy of evidence’.
Anecdotal data, n=1 trials of varying quality, correlations studies, double blind studies (with small and large cohorts), studies without attempted replication and studies with heavy replication - they are all provide evidence of varying quality and can inform the holistic scientific picture. They can all serve a purpose such as inspiring further research, providing fodder for meta analyses, etc. It simply isn’t true that gathered evidence ought to be casually discarded if it doesn’t attain the highest levels of the hierarchy of evidence. Neither is it true that some small study showing (or not showing) some supposed effect should drastically change all our lifestyle habits. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. The concept of a hierarchy of evidence can help us navigate these apparently mixed signals so prevalent in popular science discussions.
If he said unblinded at some point, it could have been because the study author looked into the cup to determine which substance had been taken too soon. The subject should have had no knowledge of what was taken until the entire 16-month trial was over.
We should avoid extreme polarization of our judgments in general. The study deserves some amount of praise for things it did somewhat well (like the method of blinding which is clever, but not applicable to everyone), and criticism for things it did not do well, such as designing your own study methodology for your own mood. That alone will affect the results. Simply RUNNING an experiment can affect your mood because it's interesting (or even maybe frustrating). The subject probably felt pride and satisfaction whenever they used their pill selection technique, which could improve mood on its own. Neither accolades nor complete derision are appropriate, although trying to claim too strong a result from this study is kinda deserving of derision if you claim to be science-minded.
The study was well-meaning and displayed cleverness.
And that is exactly the point made in the target post by the author. He explicitly raised that criticism himself. Double kudos for self-criticism. You will not find many conventional science publications pointing out: “Shucks, we could have done this a better”.
The ancestor post is neither a "Complete injustice" nor "derision" nor an "insult", and it doesn't warrant a hostile mocking reply. Its tone could have been gentler, but it wasn't that bad. And the study doesn't really deserve "accolades", it deserves to be recognized for whatever it does well. Such polarization of tone and vocabulary doesn't accomplish much, and I'll even propose that it actually prevents good things from happening. It is good that the author is aware of, and acknowledges, the problems in the study. What other studies and journals have done wrong doesn't make the author or study more deserving of praise.
Also, you asked why he said "unblinded", and I think you now have the answer to that.
Yes, perhaps. But please tell me you have read the original post. It is thoughtful, self-deprecatory, careful, well analyzed, and upfront about limitations and possible improvements.
Re-reading such a negative critique of a solid home-brew experiment is unwarranted. There are several word here worth red flags.
>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 much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.
>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
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.
If your sample is blinded yet you consistently guess correctly, then presumably either 1. you failed at blinding or 2. there is a strong and discernible effect, regardless of what your other metrics might say (your other metrics could always be flawed after all).
> 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
Assuming the blinded samples are uniformly randomly distributed, and assuming the study goes on long enough, then you'd expect that stuff to average out.
But I agree, it should be recorded nonetheless. That way you can verify at the end that it did, in fact, average out as you expected. If it didn't then your data is invalid.
He has 94 data points. Not nearly enough to average out so many potentially confounding variables, and there is no way to know they would. That will be the case in almost all N=1 experiments. Perhaps he takes the pill at the onset of stress, and stress almost always tends to build afterwards. This would be a probable case for many people trying to use theanine in this way. I could never accept that we should presume it would average out, and thus I consider logging potentially confounding variables essential to a valid experiment of this type of uncontrolled experiment. Your hypothesis would be much more relevant in a larger experiment of course.
> Perhaps he takes the pill at the onset of stress, and stress almost always tends to build afterwards.
That would not be a problem regarding the averaging I referred to, although it could well pose a problem for measurement depending on how it interacted with the selected metrics.
Note that the averaging I refer to is not regarding all possible values of some metric, but rather any discrepancy in the distribution of metrics which we expected to follow the same distribution between the sample and the control.
I think maybe there's a misunderstanding? It seems that we both agree that a variety of additional variable should be logged. I was not suggesting to omit them, but rather to use discrepancies in them to detect fundamental issues with the data or study design. I would also expect larger studies to do the same where possible.
At 94 data points it is entirely possible that there would be outliers that would have averaged out for a larger N but did not. In such a scenario the presence of such outliers should then be taken to indicate a problem with the data (ie the more discrepancies you observe, the less you should trust the data).
I was mainly saying I don't understand why you were indicating we should presume or expect they would average out in an N=1 experiment. Even in much larger experiments that is not reliably the case. Science would be relatively easy if there were not a lot of noise in the real world. So, to be clear, my concern is mainly one of scale - the experiment is far too restricted to overlook this: the smaller the experiment, the more important this type of information. Perhaps you were not saying that such averaging might be possible in an N=1 experiment and I misread, since it seems that you comment here indicates a different point.
I of course agree that logging them is basic scientific methodology - in order to detect issues with the experiment, and even hopefully to see the signal through the noise.
Yes, that is a good point. But it also causes him to continuously think about indicators to determine what he has taken. He is constantly trying to punch the veil on this "blind" study instead of doing everything he can to avoid that. Are they really the exact same weight? Do they really feel the same in his hand, mouth and throat? Does one have a slightly different taste - after all, no filling process will leave the outside of the capsule 100% free of powder, etc? Very subtle differences could manifest themselves over 16 months.
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.
N=1 is addressed, see outcome predictions. N=1 comes with caveats, of course, but a study like this, with a proven harmless supplement, should be welcomed and praised.
It is clearly a step forward from what you can watch about theanine on YouTube or TikTok. I consider this a work of citizen science. While it should not be taken for more than it is, it’s a great example of how someone can experiment without a high burden.
N=1 studies aren’t evil. They’re just pretty close to the entire history of pre-modern medicine that led us to bad evidence. My concern here is not that someone is sharing their opinions, it’s the fact that the person doing this explicitly heaps derision on the “placebo people” (or some other phrasing) and then heaps praise on other people doing N=1 studies and proceeds to do one. This stuff all needs to be treated with humor, good faith, and then extreme skepticism about any result it produces.
That's a pretty low bar though. OK, it's one step up from a monetized YouTube video that boils down to "It works--Trust me, bro." I still wouldn't really call it citizen science.
These smug pilots have lost touch with the down-to-earth lives and concerns of ordinary passengers like us. Let's see a show of hands: who thinks I should fly the plane?
It’s not about elitism. It’s that there are so many confounding factors that even a well-informed approach makes such a study comtain very little of value
Comments like yours expose a particularly distasteful amount of hubris.
You don’t like it you don’t have to read the blog article. I assure you are not the intended audience. For the rest of us it provided valuable insight.
Hell, I'd say it's an 0<=N<1 because it involves subjective mood reporting, and there was no participant who was not contaminated by flaws in the methodology.
Right. The only N that you can draw any conclusions about is the author himself. So, why even publish it? The "results" are not applicable to anyone reading it. This is the health version of the software industry's "It works on my system!"
Publish it is quite a loaded word here. Almost every blog or post you read is from the point of view of a single person. There's nothing wrong with him putting his experience out into the world.
Why do you say pseudo blinding, it seems like it is blind in that the author doesn’t know if he is taking the test or not.
Now you can argue that there isn’t enough time between samples, or he needs more subjects but he was blind to whether he was taking it that day or not.
If the author felt good on a particular day for whatever reason, and then learned they had taken the active substance, their reports are contaminated forever. It works the other way, too. It works any way you slice it.
Citizens science used to be much more common and there were several publications initially built around the concept. Unfortunately, the idea has all but been obliterated by inadequate public education and the chronic lack of time that now embattles the middle classes.
fortunately* citzen science was replaced by solid methods... this is a long fancy self reported post on a metric that is easily figured out by biomarkers (stress levels). what's the consequences if the author decided to make some claim about a substance?
I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s. It was never a replacement for professional science, but rather citizen scientists often observed things that were deemed worth of follow-up by academic researchers.
Citizens scientists rarely post “facts” but rather interesting avenues for research or further investigation. Part of being an educated citizen scientist is to understand the limitations of your knowledge, data, and methods.
Quacks and cranks, on the other hand, are always making grand new “discoveries” lol.
Anyone who has a decent education can make observations apply the scientific method. I say this coming from a family of actual scientists from molecular biology to particle physics, who will tell you the same, and also give credit to the multitude of citizen scientists who have done just that.
i think anyone researching whatever in their home is doing 'science'
but this isn't the case! i linked in an answer to my post what science knows when measuring stress... it's far away from a self-reported subjective question
i think the problem is whatever you post on the internet is politic. it may have a huge reach, and so far so good people trying far from lethal doses of theanine. now, what if an influencer wants to make their stuff look intellectual and go buy pure caffeine? how about the people coming after wards?
one thing is a 3D-print project at your garage on keyboards ergonomics, home automation, another is rock-climbing gear and another is substances with reachable lethal doses where the masses can buy (not the case here but again, i cited caffeine but there's much more). the author has a stellar presentation but they seriously researched what science does when measuring stress? they didn't even considered The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), which is used on professional research.
i stand against public posts with badly methods (or the complete lack of research) suppressed by fancy graphics on substance use/abuse. i also bet isn't that hard to buy empty pills with opaque color
>I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s.
Some version of that still exists among people with a naturalist bent recording observations of reptiles, birds, plants, etc. But yeah, we don't really have backyard chemists analyzing things anymore.
Astronomy also has an important citizen-science component, and many discoveries are made by amateur astronomers each year.
Another interesting aspect of citizen science is replication of existing scientific research,
Often with experimental modifications that make the experiment much more approachable for amateurs. Sometimes this even leads to process improvements that facilitate industrial application.
> So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?
I think what the author is saying is that for them to bother with theanine on a permanent basis, it would have to have shown an effect large enough to be apparent just from plotting.
In other words, they mean technical significance as opposed to clinical significance. A small effect can be statistically verifiable without being meaningful in practice.
an effect large enough to be
apparent just from plotting
And how large is that? Without putting a number on it, how do we come to the conclusion that the effect is not large enough? That it didn't show in their sample of data points could have been just random chance.
But before we take the measured effects at face value, I think it's important think about them more. They report significant p values of their success in predicting if the capsule holds Theanine and also for the effect of the capsule when it holds Theanine. Both negative correlations. My first thought reading this is that the Placebo tasted more like Theanine and thinking they took Theanine had a positive effect on the outcome.
>> Technically, I did find two significant results.
The problem is that he is comparing two very different things, the level when he took the pill and the level one hour after that. So it's not surprising that they are different. Let's imagine a very very very stupid experiment, where the problem is more obvious.
Does Coca Cola or Pepsi improve luck? N=1000000, double blind randomized controlled trial.
1) Each subject flips a coin. tail=0, head=1.
2) They drink a glas of soda, 50% Coke or 50% Pepsi, that is served in a hidden place and nor the subject or the experimenter know which one.
3) They roll a dice (an usual one, D6)
Results:
* Average before Coke = 0.5002
* Average after Coke = 3.5005
* Average before Pepsi = 0.5004
* Average after Pepsi = 3.5003
So the conclusion is that Coke improves the average (p<1E-a-lot) and Pepsi improves the average (p<1E-a-lot). Both are "technically" statistically significant (but it's caused by a horrible experiment design).
Unsurprisingly, the difference in the average after drinking Coke or Pepsi is not statistically significant (p<.something).
(I'm too lazy to run a simulation now, but it's not difficult to get realistic averages and p values.)
In conclusion, the useful result is the comparison of the anxiety after taking both drugs, not the difference of before and after taking them.
I think is great that folk self observe, and that is a key to a lot, everyone ought to find what works for themselves, however there is a tendency to want to fix things with pills. There is a fundamental error there, if successful you might damp your symptoms but then you start a Whac-A-Mole (whac-a-symptom) but you are not looking at the root. The problem will come in another form. Have you consider that the symptom is a defence mechanism ?What about Taichi, mindfulness ness practices, yoga why not a study on that? It is definitely more work… than taking some pills. No I am not against taking supplements. But ultimately is a workaround you are not fixing the bug
I’m not sure if this is your intention, but I take issue with the implication that “pills” (aka “medication” and “medicine,” “pills” has a generally negative connotation) aren’t often the solution to the root problem.
It is great if you can solve things with diet, mindfulness, etc. But sometimes you need medical intervention and yes sometimes that means you need to take medication in the form of pills. There are millions of people who need that regardless of how they change their lifestyle or regulate their emotions/mental health without them.
Basically I don’t like the idea that you are implying medication is a bandaid and not ever the actual solution. If I misreading your comment my apologies
This is good point, thank you, lot of people needs medicine, and i am glad they are accesible. My point goes more towards this: Imagine someone runs a marathon everyday, after a couple of months, start experiencing pain and inflammation. Do they need painkillers or do they need to ask themselves why they are running a marathon everyday? I am not against taking some painkillers as long as you also ask yourself the question. Do i really need to run a marathon everyday? I do not want to cure disease with yoga, no, but you should give it a go, whatever works for you, self observe, train a bit, walk in the forest, surf, meditate. Wellbeing cannot be achieved only with medicine.
The strawman sentiment of "no medication ever" is a pretty easy take to herald against.
The nuanced truth is that our medical industry is flawed; since most illnesses are defined by their set of apparent symptoms (with most root causes not fully understood) the standard approach is to treat "symptoms" with medicines with sides effects rivaling the original ailment!
What if the lack of proper diet ('proper' varies wildly with populations), drugs/alcohol, sleep, stress, and exercise were the originating cause? Rushing to the medication treatment without fixing those vitals first eliminates the opportunity.
Our bodies have much more adaptive self-healing resilience properties innate to our species development than our own species hubris seems to acknowledge. And most people severely underestimate the importance big four.
“Technically” here could imply “not corrected for multiple tests”. But the typical qualifier I use is “nominally significant” when I don’t apply an correction for multiple tests.
Or “not using a one-way t test”.
The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
What impressed me most is the suggestion for an improved experimental design to remove his temporal drift by using 100 pre-loaded envelopes and only decoding the results at the end.
> The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
I disagree with this. You have a prior belief that theanine might reduce anxiety; if you wanted to you could codify that subjective belief and perform some variety of Bayesian hypothesis test [1] and compute a Bayes factor. The main reason that one-sided tests are advocated for is power; that is often the same as having a prior belief in disguise. Why not quantify it?
However, scientifically, if the data conclusively show that "theanine increases anxiety" that is a meaningful, non-artefactual result: it is hugely important to be sensitive to the answer 'you are wrong' and may well ironically spur development in a direction to help understand what is going on. I personally think that one sided tests are best avoided except in the case where it is physically impossible to have an effect in the other direction. Examples of this are rare, but they do occasionally exist.
Sure. I can see your point, but the most reasonable posterior probability of the null given the biohacker community’s belief is one-tailed. This also gives more power to reject the null.
I've been using theanine for a long time, but never for any of these purported benefits. And the benefits I do use it for would be near impossible to measure. I just use it to make a over-caffinated monkey brain state tend toward a "lock-in" mental state. That's super hard to measure, and just as likely the theanine is a trigger for a mental deep dive that could just as well be sugar. But the ritual works, and that's what's important to me. It just took the intial "It helps mellow out caffeine for deep focus" idea to establish the ritual.
Well the issue is that an experiment with 1 person can’t prove much because you can’t have a control group.
Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects.
You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later.
Excellent data and statistics is not sufficient for a good experiment
An experiment of 1 person can very well produce useful data.
It depends on the setup of the experiment.
Imagine an experiment where a person's thumb gets randomly hit with either a hammer or a feather once per day. And they then subjectively rate the experience. After 1000 days of collecting data, I doubt that we would wrongly come to the conclusion that the hammer treatment leads to the nicer outcome.
The setup of the Theanine experiment which is the basis of this thread looks good on first sight. I have the feeling that the interpretation could use more thought though.
Yes and no. The issue with a self-administered experiment is that becomes part of the experiment. Does the self-administration and the associated thoughts and beliefs affect the results? It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.
>It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.
TFA describes a protocol for doing just that. The author randomly selected between the treatment dose and placebo. They didn't reveal the choice until after the effect should be complete so they could record the results.
A problem I see is that you can never be sure that it also works for other people. Just because one person reacts to a specific treatment does not mean that people on average react to the treatment in the same way. That’s the problem of having a sample size of 1. In other words: We cannot say much about whether the effect generalizes to a larger population from knowing that it has an affect on just one person.
A similar, actually useful, experiment is the one where a guy cracked the knuckles of only one hand for several years and found no ill effects from doing so compared to the other hand with non-cracked knuckles.
Then you find {imagining scenarios} that the bruising causes some effect that 'inoculates' against heart disease, or the feather carries a pathogen that later induces dementia??
Sure. But even when you add noise to the described experiment, you get useful data.
That is the point I am making: Experiments of a single person can be useful.
The critics of single person experiments usually come up with examples vastly different than the Theanine experiment described here. With long term experiments which are only conducted once. But the Theanine experiment was looking for a short term effect and can be conducted many times. The hammer experiment I made up would be an extreme example of this type of experiment which leads itself well to be conducted by a single person.
What I am trying to point out is that if you are a skeptic, it would be better to try and find weaknesses in the experiment at hand. Not making up completely different experiments.
The experiment answers a useful question: does theanine have a strong, acute anti-stress effect on the experimenter?
Effect size is the key element of this question. If the substance was alprazolam (Xanax) instead of theanine, we would almost certainly see a strong effect here. The same would be true for heroin, ethanol, or cocaine.
It's not trying to test whether there might be a strong effect for most people or whether there are any side effects. Other experiments have been done with theanine seeking to answer those questions; the answers appear to be no and no.
> Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects.
> You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later.
But that's not the actual experiment here. Your criticism is invalid. The author randomised every day which supplement to take.
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.
Been using antihistamines, and a dehumidifier for several months now and sleeping better than I have in years. Given how extremely common mite allergies are there's got to be a lot of folks with undiagnosed issues here.
I was surprised how much dust this thing picked up (my sheets get washed often, but it’s hard to clean the mattress itself). Back in the day people used to sun dry their mattresses but no one does that these days.
This dust mite vacuum picked up half a canister of gunk from my dead skin and environmental dust that has accumulated over the years (and it has a light scattering sensor that tells you how much dust is being sucked up). My nose was clear after sleeping on a vacuumed bed. I now vacuum my bed once a week, and it has really helped.
Vacuuming your bed and other fabric surfaces also feels therapeutic. For me, it’s like watching one of those powerwashing videos. You feel cleansed after.
Vacuuming one's bed makes complete sense to me, but what is special about the model you linked to that makes it specifically a 'mattress' vacuum cleaner? Many canister vacuum cleaners are more powerful and can be used elsewhere in the home too (with a different attachment for hygiene, of course). There's the UV light, but I can't see how this is effective when used only for short periods of time. The dust won't be removed with it and the mites will withstand it too.
Not wanting to make you feel bad about your purchase, but is there something unique about this kind of device that gives it an edge over conventional vacuum cleaners?
You can use a conventional vacuum if it has enough suction (most of these dust mite vacuums are rated at 13 kPa, a sweet spot for extraction without damaging fabric), and if you don’t mind using the same vacuum attachment on other surfaces. These also have rotating polyurethane fins that go close to the surface which helps in agitation — most vacuum attachments have plastic brushes which I suppose will do the job but possibly slightly less effectively.
It’s not a mattress vacuum so much as a dust mite vacuum that can be used on couches, fabric chairs etc. It’s also handheld and is specialized for the job, so it’s more ergonomic to hold.
The UV I can’t really vouch for but can’t hurt. I personally would not run a conventional vacuum on my mattress because I use the same vacuum on less hygienic surfaces, but if you have a dedicated attachment why not — I feel it would be less effective (because in my experience, the suction is often diminished when you use an attachment) but have no data. If you have a high end vacuum this is less of a factor, but most low end vacuums like Hoovers aren’t designed to deliver full suction with attachments.
I’m happy with my purchase because I feel that given it’s small size, I’m more likely to vacuum more frequently. I’m less likely to want to bust out the big vacuum.
I jumped on the idea but then immediately came to the same conclusion. Now I’m thinking I stick with the vac(s) I have, but get a separate UV. And UV the bed while I’m working. Maybe?
I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)?
I think the problem would be temperature control, as you don't want to damage the item, but need to maintain an even, specific air temperature, you'd need turbulence. Then vacuum clean afterwards.
Maybe a wallpaper remover style device with a hot air source instead of steam??
I guess they just don't want folks giving themselves burns during sleep.
AliExpress as always is tempting [1], but you'd have to be incredibly careful about regulating temperature [2] and adding safety interlocks that'd make falling asleep with it active, or forgetting to turn it off impossible.
Look into something like flexwatt tape. Maybe run it during the day when your not sleeping. In my mind, they probably use something similar inside heated blankets with some kind of limiter/thermostat.
Do your research though!! I'm not sure if flexwatt tape could ignite your mattress, but you would definitely want to know for sure yourself beforehand!
There are ways to control heat though; I'm familiar with using flexwatt tape with reptile enclosures, hooked up to a thermostat with a probe in the habitat for temp control. Maybe some math, like desired_temp = watts_supplied * feet_of_fw_tape, where the watts_supplied is the independent variable you adjust based on the required feet_of_fw_tape for your mattress to get the dependent variable desired_temp. Probably include a fail safe, but I'm no electrician, proceed at your own risk.
They do sell self contained fire extinguishers you can hang on your ceiling that deploy automatically at a certain temperature, ideally putting out fire sources they are hung above. Nice to have around for things like this.
>I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)?
People do something similar to kill bedbugs, I think they make specialized equipment to do so, but it might just be something like an off the shelf heat gun.
Just a data point. I have a mattress encasement which has never been removed (I got it to protect against bedbugs). Dust (dead human skin) still accumulates on the surface. It might not go into the mattress, but it will be on the surface. Since the encasements are never meant to be removed, vacuuming the mattress (with encasement on) still makes sense.
I asked above as well, but since you have direct experience, what do you have between the plastic and you? Aside from the fitted sheet? Wouldn’t a regular mattress cover just attract mites as well?
It’s suppose to prevent bedbugs and others from setting up shop inside the mattress but the surface is fair game. The idea being it’s easier to clean the surface than the insides.
I have had the encasement for years. No problems with humidity but I also live in a less humid area (41-45% rh all year round).
So a dust mite vaccuum still makes sense.
Also interesting fact: dust mites themselves are harmless to humans. It’s their fecal matter (after digesting our dead skin) that are allergens.
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.
I doubt a bit of UV on a vacuum does anything to a mite. They're kinda like spiders with a hard shell after all. One study [1] found you need one hour of hard UV-C exposure to kill most mites. That would probably also degrade the textiles and foam of your mattress, and probably does not even reach most mites/eggs in between threads and foam pores.
Obviously there are different species of dust mites, but the ones I'm familiar with are nearly invincible. They are able to cling onto smooth surfaces even with a vacuum cleaner right over them. I've noticed that they are 'directional' in their grip though: when the vacuum cleaner is behind their direction of travel, they'll hold fast, but if you move the vacuum in front of them they'll be sucked up. Thus, drawing the vacuum nozzle back and forth repeatedly seems to me to be essential for reliably getting rid of them.
As for UV, I have no idea. They seem to survive on surfaces that get exposed to sunlight though windows, but apparently glass blocks most UV radiation. You'll have to make a new post with your results if you try it :)
Got to say after figuring this out I am tempted to ditch the western style mattress and replace it with something like a Japanese futon. I assume it'd be much easier to wash.
In the meantime I need to purchase a mattress encasement, I put one on my pillow and that alone helped a bunch.
Long term maybe desensitization is an option but I'm too lazy for that atm.
I did a desensitization and it helped a little bit. Despite the regular washing and using a dust mite vacuum I'm still having a hard time getting good sleep though. At least my nose isn't bloody in the morning anymore, so I guess that's something.
In my country we used to use woolen matresses, which would be completely emptied and washed twice a year, and the wool would be dried in the sun for a good two days, then whipped with a long stick for couple hours, and then filled back in the washed cover again. Nowadays it's very rare unfortunately.
I had the same experience, it just occurred to me that I could vaccum the mattress with the for-textile head and was really surprised with the amount of dust and its texture (transparent dust holder is satisfying hehe)
> Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth
I would suggest people look for this symptom first before jumping onto nasal corticosteroids.
Fluticasone and others have low systemic absorption and low side effects in theory, but there are several studies that found some suppression of the HPA axis similar to taking small doses of oral corticosteroids like prednisone. The effect is small, but I wouldn’t suggest trying it out as a 1-month experiment unless you have specific symptoms of stuffy nose in the mornings.
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 hypersensitivity.
I’m really glad to see this side discussion on dust mite allergy happening here. I’ve had dust mite allergy since childhood, and I even had adenoid removal surgery at age ~7 to address it. Nothing seems to help.
I think dust mite allergy imitates some of the symptoms of sleep apnea, because your nasal passage gets blocked at night, waking you in a similar way to choking.
I’ve reached my mid-30s, largely ignoring the symptoms, but over the past few months I’ve been experiencing a truly terrible bout of insomnia.
I think it’s time to take the allergy seriously again. I’ll follow your guide and make some changes. If I could suggest an improvement to your guide: it may be useful to have a section (perhaps chapter 5?) on symptom relief. I’ve had friends say that a neti pot works wonders, for example.
There's an interesting "subcategory" of sleep apnea under the moniker of UARS. I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of folks in that community actually have allergenic rhinitis (or structural issues).
I actually had a home sleep study done before I figured out it was allergies. Came back negative for OSA but my RIP [1] band data showed a lot of paradoxical breathing and flow limitation indicating significant respiratory effort. So more or less struggling to breathe all night long.
The poor sleep quality really destroys your quality of life.
Appreciate the resource -- I think my biggest question from reading it: How can you actually tell if you have dust mite problems? How can you tell if they've gotten better or not? How can I tell if I've hit a point where things are about as good as they're going to get? etc.
I have asthma symptoms from dust mites, and discovered that sniffing items creates a reaction in my lungs that is pretty sensitive to the amount of allergen in the item. Dust mite allergens also have a distinct but subtle smell you can learn.
Regarding whether or not your health issues are caused by dust mites, if you have any of the allergic disease, or if you have a tested dust mite allergy, it is likely they are causing problems. Disease severity is also associated with dust mite exposure.
Basically, the worse you have allergies, the more likely it's dust mites.
It's an almost certainty you home has dust mites and their allergens, unless you live in a very dry climate.
My advice is to create conditions in your house in which dust mites cannot thrive, which is relatively easy to verify with hygrometers. Over time, this will lead to lead to lower allergen levels, particularly if you are proactive about removing the ones that are currently there.
Another simple hack is to exit your outside the home outer clothes when you get home. There are virulent extra allergic dust mites, that has really helped my family. And these products can help with laundry at lower temps and harder to launder items. https://elfbrands.com/collections/elf-brands
I tried to send a message to your the feedback email address on your dustmite guide site but gmail told me it was undeliverable because the address was not found.
What I emailed about was asking what you meant by biweekly for washing bedding - is that twice a week or every other week?
In the early days, populations of eggs and protonymphs are high and perhaps you haven't learned to control humidity in different weather conditions, washing 2x a week will be effective imho.
But if you can maintain low humidity for a longer periods, the dust mite populations in your home will go down and frequent washing will be less important.
thanks for letting me know my email fwding is not working. Twice a week. Be sure to wash as hot as your machine can do. I found that the highest setting on my front loading LG washer does 158f and is more effective than the next hottest setting.
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.
Antihistamines could even work without any allergy since they are typically used as mild sleeping aids. They are also used often off-label for stress reduction. [0]
I find the steroids even more effective but they seem to exacerbate my anxiety after a few days though. Still haven't figured that out.
With regular use antihistamines quite quickly lose their drowsiness effects. But it's definitely a nice side effect for sleeping challenged folks. Azelastine is a second generation antihistamine so not particularly drowsiness inducing.
One of the interesting Azelastine quirks, is it's apparently somewhat antiviral [1].
> Theoretically, these drugs might increase the risk of dementia by blocking a particular brain neurotransmitter or increasing brain inflammation. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that these pills might increase the risk of dementia, while other studies have found no risk. And all the studies are inherently flawed.
Desloratadine is considered to have a low anticholinergic burden, and of course not crossing the BBB readily should reduce risks further.
But it is one of the more anticholinergic second gen antihistamines, make of that what you will, still miles behind something like Benadryl. Fexofenadine is apparently a less anticholinergic alternative.
You can always go to an allergist for a skin prick test.
I'd say hallmark symptom would be chronic night time congestion worsening while in bed (an area of the house that has a very high density of mite allergen).
But running a bit of differential diagnosis on this,
Been doing immunotherapy for allergies for 3 years and it is a complete game changer. Last year was the first year I could breathe through my nose for the entire year. No more stuffy months.
Wouldn't changing the matress help? Also, if you using a pillow, consider keep them under the sun every few days. You can even keep the matress under the sun, maybe on the terrace if you have access to it. Pillows can also be washed as well.
Telling you from my own experience. It could work for you if you haven't tried already.
You are aware of mattress covers for Dust Mites? And there is an enzyme additive for laundry. Finally a hand steamer for upholstered stuff. I had bad hives from allergies to them, and a medical resident suggested a clearing of all fabric in my life, as best as I could.
Thanks for this idea. Can you recommend a particular model? A quick search found mostly just vacs. I have a vac(s). Perhaps I just get in the habit of treating my bed with UV?
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-experimentation:
Werner Forssmann performed the first heart catheterization on himself. He got the Nobel prize.
Barry Marshal injected himself with heliobacter pylori to prove that it causes stomach ulcers. Also got the Nobel prize.
Jessie Lazear allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with yellow fever to prove his hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for transmission. No Nobel prize, but he did contract the disease, thus proving his hypothesis…before dying from yellow fever two weeks later.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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).
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
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'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.
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’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!
If anyone is interested in running their own self guided experiments, I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. We got in the top 3 on ProductHunt not too long ago [2], and I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [3].
Does your app make you randomize the when you do the intervention you’re tracking?
If not then almost everything you track is just a proxy for something else like how someone might only take melatonin on nights they knew they were going to sleep badly, or read in bed on nights they were already feeling good, not stressed.
Or they only take their meme supplements on days they aren’t stressed out by other things in life that make you neglect yourself, so the meme pills always correlate with good things.
It’s a major problem with Whoop’s insights feature. It needs a way to make you coin flip an intervention to be useful.
What is the feature set you're looking for? There are symptom-specific apps and track anything apps, but I'm unaware of any that combines both into a generic solution. We have a roadmap item to implement things on Android. https://changemap.co/ntl/reflect/task/9239-android-version-o...
This is nice. I love that people can be so rigorous and honest as well.
I just want to add that what brings my stress down (although I didn’t research it so thoroughly) is small rituals. Things to focus on, to do well, to “take a moment”. For me it’s making morning coffee. Making/baking bread, filling the dishwasher.
Maybe I’m borderline OCD. But maybe many people are and just the rituals of taking pills (actually) relieves some stress. It seems so based on the study.
Edit Fwiw, being about 20 years into my scientific career I’ve also come to prefer just looking at the data.
True. But for me sometimes when I’m stressed (usually related to some lack of control) I may get very precise about how the dishwasher is organized among others. It’s annoying for people around me, but at least it’s not hard drugs.
That doesn’t sound like OCD at all to me. It sounds like you have a personality that values order and control over details. Annoying perhaps, but normal.
If it’s getting to the point where it impedes your social life, you could see a psychiatrist, but I’m pretty sure the diagnosis wouldn’t be OCD.
OCD is characterized by strong feelings of anxiety which can only be temporarily subdued by compulsive, repeated behavior. The classic example is “can’t leave the house without washing hands 20 times, sometimes 40”. The anxiety is still there but slightly dampened by the compulsive ritual. If you don’t have crippling anxiety, you don’t have OCD.
I have a sensitive stomach, and I’ve found peppermint oil to be a fairly good supplement to help. I’ve also noticed that my stomach is more irritated when I’m anxious and stressed. The act of taking the peppermint oil, whether my stomach is acting up or not seems to be one of the biggest anxiety relievers to me.
Gwern has a large collection of blinded self-experiments. The only reason I suspect it’s not a more valued resource is that his results often contradict the popular wisdom in supplement communities.
Contrast those results with some of the unbelievably positive anecdotes you read about magnesium, fish oil, B-vitamins, or even LSD micro dosing causing life changing positive effects.
It’s well known that placebo effect is a strong driver of perceived effects of most supplements. The placebo effect becomes much stronger when people are primed to expect large effects. Not coincidentally, the people who report the most dramatic effects are often those who consume large amounts of podcasts, YouTube videos, or social media influencer content about those supplements. If someone listens to a 3-hour Huberman Lab episode where he explains how a “protocol” or supplement will do amazing things while using (and frequently misusing) lots of neurotransmitter names and underpowered mouse studies, that person might become so primed to expect those effects that they’re nearly guaranteed to happen. In a weird way, that means it does actually work for them, but it’s not necessarily because the supplant is producing the outcome. It’s because they’re so deeply primed to expect the outcome (e.g. feeling more energy, relaxing to fall asleep) that they placebo themselves into making it happen.
This site, Gwern, is really fascinating but I found it initially rather difficult to navigate and understand.
I do wish the author had provided a clear, layperson conclusion/results portion for each nootropic. For example, having read the section on fish oil, I still haven’t grasped whether the author observed positive results or not. Perhaps he is being rightfully cautious in drawing conclusions?
Their microdosing experimentation was questionable. Not methodically, it was quite thorough, but iirc they used unknown strength street blotters and derived all further experimentation from that.
As I always point out, all of the anecdotes claiming microdosing works are usually using street blotters as well, including the research papers which draw on crowdsourcing to circumvent the obvious problems with using schedule I psychedelics; and the research papers which do use better-validated dosages... don't usually turn up anything more than I did. Plus, it's 2025. If LSD microdosing really worked, after all this interest over the past 15+ years, why is there still so little good evidence?
I can't tell you why, but the fact that LSD is a schedule 1 drug with a strong stigma and that it's a drug that can't be patented will severely hamper any study efforts.
Some current theories re: microdosing efficacy that I've seen are that people who report benefits from microdosing (beyond placebo) are inadvertently self medicating ADHD symptoms, which seems plausible, given LSDs stimulant effect and 5HT2A affinity.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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" :-)
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)
I’d add one more possibility: “Theanine works but I need a higher dosage to feel the effect.”
FWIW my purely anecdotal findings are that supplier does matter. Natural Factors Suntheanine gave me a noticeable effect. Nature’s way L-Theanine did not.
I used to take theanine in college, and this was my experience even over a decade ago.
Suntheanine was consistently effective and most of the other brands were seemingly inactive or unnoticable. I've always had to order online as all of the brands I've bought in store seem to be bunk.
Even still I found tolerance to rise quickly with daily theanine use.
OP took 200 mg. Tea contains 5–20 mg and people commonly report beneficial effects from tea. If 5 mg is enough for some people then surely 200 mg would be enough for anyone?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since reading Gwern's essay on nootropics [1] I've wanted to experiment with theanine. Caffeine is obviously a fantastic stimulant, and I take care not to consume it too frequently (I try to limit my intake to no more than three times a week based on the research of Michael Dickens [2]).
As such, I have next to no tolerance. As great as having no tolerance is for the productivity benefits, it does have undesirable side effects. A single cup of coffee can get me twitchy and slightly shaky, and a cup of tea past noon can impact my ability to fall asleep.
A gripe I have is the lack of good research into the combination of theanine and caffeine, and I think I'd be a good candidate for a blinded test looking into it. I would like to carry one out but really do lack experience in tests of this nature.
Does anyone know any good resources for someone interested in learning how to conduct a self-study such as this, including details regarding common pitfalls?
There's a great podcast by Andrew Huberman on dopamine I listened to last week where he discusses theanine at the end. It's a fantastic (but 3 hour long) primer[0] for anyone wanting to learn more.
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.
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.
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.
By giving these things to random people, we don't do a very good job of evaluating their effects. If something works on 10% of the population, randomly selecting participants in an experiment will never give a significant result. If something is generally safe, it seems better to experiment on yourself.
The problem this solves is that some things work on some people. Neurotransmitters are blunt instruments that do many things- and are subject to adaptation effects where you get an effect for a while then the system adjusts to the new baseline. Maybe someone out there has a deficiency and adding more helps them for a bit, other people don't have a deficiency and get no results. Other people have a deficiency, something works for a little bit, then the brain adjusts to the new levels and the effect slowly disappears.
Until we can measure the level of the physiological effect we are targeting, the n=1 experiment seems like the only real way to see what group you fall into.
>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.
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?
> 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.
The biggest takeaway for me is how unreliable our subjective sense of "this works" can be without proper controls. Also, the way placebo + regression to the mean can make almost anything seem effective in the moment
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.
>One study they review found that theanine worked better than alprazolam (xanax) for acute anxiety. The correct response would be, “That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion casts doubt on everything.” But the review sort of takes it at value and moves on.
“That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion reveals why we don't use single studies to draw conclusions as it's not only possible but expected that some percentage of study results are going to be well outside 2 standard deviations from the mean.”
I just wanna nitpick that because one of my pet peeves is people not realizing that you can follow the scientific method really well and still end up with outlier data.
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.
Great experiment! It’s important to highlight that even in rigorously blinded studies which find a drug ineffective on average, there can still be genuine responders—this is known scientifically as “heterogeneous treatment effects.” Essentially, individuals vary in genetics, metabolism, and neurochemistry, which can cause meaningful differences in drug responsiveness. Thus, an N=1 trial, like yours, might indeed reveal real personal benefits that wouldn’t appear in a population-level analysis.
However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.
I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2].
I like this idea! To build on it, the schedules could be non-random (systematic with random offset) and test combinations of substances in a way that maximises information both in the cases where substances are independent and when they have suspected interactions.
I appreciate the high agency and citizen science here. However, I think 1) theanine should not be isolated but ingested in context (via a nice pot of tea) 2) there should be a little bit more respect for statistical methods.
While those two points appear to be contradictory (the first appears to inject noise/variability, the second is intended to reduce noise), I believe they each produce a superior result. Regarding the first point (drinking tea instead of ingesting a capsule), theanine does not operate in isolation, but instead interacts significantly with other compounds. Regarding the second point, statistics are the lifeblood of these kinds of trials, what is the purpose of a series of trials without a correct analysis? (I believe it should be standard to devote a huge chunk of time to getting the math right during the analysis, even though it is hard/unintuitive.)
I have taken a lot at times, up to 1-2g per day in powder form. I mix it with my tea, which also has theanine.
However I can't say it really helped with anxiety. TFA says some people claim its more effective than xanax. Maybe it works like that for some people, but not for me - it doesn't even put a dent in my anxiety - which can be pretty bad (struggling to leave the house). I've never taken xanax either, although my doc once gave me 10 pills of lorezepam for acute anxiety situations. Those basically had no effect on me too.
Theanine does reduce caffeine jitters although I usually only have that problem with coffee. These days I take 200mg most days mostly out of habit.
I tried 200mg L-theanine pills for some days. I noticed a slightly calming effect, but after the supposed effect wore off, I suffered from unusually high level of anxiety. So I guess it can give you withdrawal symptoms. CBD worked much better for me in that regard.
I started taking 1 x 50mg CBD gummy in the morning about 2 months ago and I can confirm that it is better than L-theanine. My analysis-paralysis is gone. I am moving forward with my life better than I have in 15 years.
I was one of the commenters in the HN thread linked by the blog post, and I do find that L-theanine reduces my coffee jitters.
I only used it occasionally, took it about 1 hours before going to sleep. I can't really comment on daily use or dosage. I just bought whatever CBD oil a local market was selling. It contains 10% broad spectrum CBD isolate (rest being hemp oil) if the label is to be believed. At least in my country these things aren't well regulated, so experiences will probably vary between vendors, as you can't be sure of exact CBD concentration.
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
Wish more people would report their placebo experiments. I have periodically run them on myself, and am consistently surprised how I have been unable to differentiate substances I thought were helpful (adderall, kratom) end up indistinguishable from placebo over 20+ trials. I guess that my main takeaway was that it is hard to pinpoint when subtle drugs work. My second takeaway was that the data I generated would prob be useful to share, but with no examples anyone cared I opted against. This story inspires me to potentially revisit some of my past placebo tests and show my data.
Since no one has mentioned it yet, given the author felt like Japanese tea was providing a calming / anti-anxiety effect but with a much lower potential dose of Theanine....I wonder what would happen if he repeated the experiment with a sub-lingual dosing mechanism?
It seems like this would be closer to taking the tea in your mouth and savoring it over multiple sips across a few minutes, and could explain the smaller apparent dose having an effect (some of the Theanine goes straight into the bloodstream and bypasses the digestive tract).
As a person who drinks tea for 30+ year old in a country which is top 3 in world tea consumption, I can say that theanine works. The biggest advantage of it when compared to caffeine, it doesn't create that tension in the body. You just work and concentrate. While it's not as powerful as caffeine, it allows one to work very efficiently and for long hours, if they choose to do so.
Also, against the popular myth, black tea / theanine doesn't affect iron absorption that much (if any), if it was, the whole country would be anemic, and we are not.
I’m not sure, but seems like there should be a difference between someone conducting research while testing theanine versus someone just consuming theanine to battle anxiety. That’s probably been said in other comments in a more scientific way. But it also seems like consuming yummy hot tea that happen to have theanine would be another relevant method for comparison. Maybe placebo, theanine pill, and tea drink (or other naturally occurring food source)? It just seems like the tea or act of drinking tea and the time it takes might be relaxing??
Once the author started taking pills independently of their stress level, the variance of differences diminished a lot. I'd wager this supports the mean reversion hypothesis.
Also, while I agree with their general conclusion that theanine probably doesn't reduce stress, I'd give assign more probability to the hypothesis that theanine does work, but in other design settings. For example: drinking tea instead of taking pills, or measuring stress levels after a day instead of an hour, or evaluating the difference across time instead of in time chunks.
This is the first time I've seen a self-study with l-theanine in the context of stress relief. In fact, somehow, it's the first time I've ever seen stress relief mentioned on the topic. For me it has always been about providing a small cognitive boost. The result is clear: for this particular individual, and the specific goal of stress relief, l-theanine does not work.
My anecdote: I used l-theanine supplement for about a year straight. To me, the noticable effect was similar to that of a cup of coffee but with practically none of the jitters.
From a biology perspective base amino acids (such as theanine) on their own are not generally major modulators of human function. You want to experiment with small molecules, something that binds with proteins such as enzymes which in turn modulate pathways and cell functions.
Binders need a energy configuration and 3 dimensional structures that "fits" into such proteins, and individual amino acids dont really cut it. Also the amino acids get rapidly used for protein construction so they dont stick around long.
PhDs in the subject can please correct me I am wrong here.
I wish people can pay for trials on products. e.g. In subreddits for hairfall, people cite all sort of very badly done research that shows some chemical in expensive product as effective, for which the only research is sponsored by the company making it. If 1000 people in that subreddit pays $100, it might be enough for a good trial and knowing the active people there, they would likely pay even more. Same for multivitamins, the research on that is so important yet so bad and biased, and getting million dollar crowdfunding should be possible.
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.
A bit unrelated, but try having l theanine after a night of drinking: it makes you wake up fresh and without a hangover because it speeds up alcohol processing and it metabolites by the liver and also prevents alcoholic liver damage. Me and all my friends who tried it say “i wake up totally fresh after theanine”. There’s also a study confirming this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16141543/
> Many people try theanine and report wow or great for ADHD or cured my (social) anxiety or changing my life.
I'd never heard of that.
All my life I've drank enormous amounts of tea. To the point that I've had withdrawal symptoms from physical caffeine addiction. But I'm only recognizing more ADHD symptoms the more I read about it. (Not a controlled experiment; I'm aware of that.)
1. Theanine is an analog for Glutamate and Glutamine.
2. Due to indirect relationships to ADHD, Depression, etc. no one take Theanine by itself...I do not.
3. When drugs are created we often have incomplete pictures, for example SSSrIs for depression...we now know its both low levels in serotonin and GABA combined...bias yes I take Theanine, GABA and Glutamine for depression and it does work.
One experiment on oneself means very little...I know as I spent 36 months finding the combo that works for my depression and ADHD.
I've been conducting a self-experiment on the effects of various substances (all legal and easily accessible) on sleep for about four months, following a similar approach to the author. Using two different sleep trackers, I rely solely on absolute, measurable values, avoiding subjective impressions. It's fun but requires time and patience—sometimes I have to restart cycles from scratch. So far, I’ve gathered datasets for Phenibut, Theanine, Piracetam, and Baclofen. The experiment is still ongoing.
I love theanine as a low-level anxiolytic. My recommendation:
* Try a lower dosage first. 400mg made me irritable. 100mg works great for me.
* Effect seems to lessen if taken consecutive days; in fact it might have the opposite effect of making one more irritable than calmer.
A few nights ago I was tossing and turning because I had too much coffee before bed. A theanine pill and sleep was restored. It doesn't do much more than that, but it's good to have for one of those days that you just want to punch a wall.
Coffee contains several ingredients that act as opioid receptor antagonists, which can be unpleasant (as in "reverse the pleasant / calming effects of endogenic opioids"). Some people seem to be more affected than others, kinda like with the intensive gastrin release / coffee induced instapoop.
Amino Acid therapy requires an empty stomach, and the postulated effects usually require larger doses. But that would blow up his experiment design. Also there can be time of day widows for efficacy. Science has gotten far with lock and key receptor models. But some of this stuff can be sensitive to time and cofactors, beyond genetic and epigenetic individual variance.
I think the experiment is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption the time to metabolize medication is identical to time for the body to return to baseline.
Regular Vitamin-D supplements can taken once a week or daily and have the same long term effect.
And for a sample of N=1: The L-theanine side effects of one dose last several days. Taking it daily makes the side effects significantly worse.
What a waste of opportunity and time. All for nothing because author was too lazy to make blank capsules and used Vit D, which of course may have effect. You can buy capsules easily and have true blind test.
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 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.
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
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.
sorry this experiment setup suffers from the photon dual slit experiment problems. How anxious am i really if i am observing my stress levels, noting down pre and post measurements? Placebo or not, this level of mindfulness is probably the biggest anxiety affecting factor so it invalidates the experiment.
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.
Can for myself just say I took the anime for a while but don't think it did anything. Way higher effect was switching to decaf and then drink mushroom coffee for alertness. There are different mixes out there, I just went with a random one from Amazon when I enjoyed some test-packages from chi-coffee. I'm also mixing with cocos cream and cows milk.
I like this work a lot.It seems like the sort of thing that if done by thousands of like minded people would build a knowlege base that cuts through the very very messy reality of life, and gets us closer to rules of thumb that might help.
chinese medicine with techno characteristics?
cyber herbal8sm
:) we need an app for this
But...
data eh?
the ONLY repository of data, is genes.vast, tested in deep time, with countless trilions of runs.now running on quintillions of test units.
we have access to a tiny portion of the data, but
are at the stage of? do you read the text from the right?left? top? bottom?, but of course its read as a gestalt, and so outside of our capacity.
What may be accessable, is our enzimatic relationships with the substances in our environment, and how those balances are specific to groups and individuals, but it wont be easy to unravel, records plus actual chemical testing of anything, anywhere, anytime
which boils down to "light" sensors, that are capable of seeing and diferentiating the exicitation of molecules under ambiant conditions.
what is dismissed by so called science, are the indivuals who survive and thrive under exactly the same conditions that decimate there peers, and how "science" is perfectly happy to call something "luck" and then move towards monitising "bad luck"
.....scientificly.....rather that work towards understanding the framework that governs everything
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
”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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_for_self-tracking
I also built a bunch of tooling to analyze the data.
I think that mankind could greatly benefit from more people doing randomized studies on their own. Especially if we find a way to collectively interpret the data.
So I really applaud the author for conducting this and especially for providing the raw data.
Reading through the article and the comments here on HN, I wish there was more focus on the interpretation of the experiment. Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.
Let's look at the author's interpretation. Personally, I find that part a bit short.
They calculated 4 p-values and write:
I wonder what "Technically" means here. Are there "significant results" that are "better" than just "technically significant results"?Then they continue:
So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?It's great that they offer the raw data. I look forward to taking a look at it later today.
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 much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.
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 possible improvements.
Unlike most large high N clinical trials this is a high resolution longitudinal trial, and it is perfectly “controlled” for genetic difference (none), well controlled for environment, and there is only one evaluator.
Compare this to the messy and mostly useless massive studies of human depression reviewed by Jonathan Flint.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36702864/
I think social media discussions of science would be better informed by the concept of a ‘hierarchy of evidence’.
Anecdotal data, n=1 trials of varying quality, correlations studies, double blind studies (with small and large cohorts), studies without attempted replication and studies with heavy replication - they are all provide evidence of varying quality and can inform the holistic scientific picture. They can all serve a purpose such as inspiring further research, providing fodder for meta analyses, etc. It simply isn’t true that gathered evidence ought to be casually discarded if it doesn’t attain the highest levels of the hierarchy of evidence. Neither is it true that some small study showing (or not showing) some supposed effect should drastically change all our lifestyle habits. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. The concept of a hierarchy of evidence can help us navigate these apparently mixed signals so prevalent in popular science discussions.
Here’s a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/882/ For the small sample
If he said unblinded at some point, it could have been because the study author looked into the cup to determine which substance had been taken too soon. The subject should have had no knowledge of what was taken until the entire 16-month trial was over.
We should avoid extreme polarization of our judgments in general. The study deserves some amount of praise for things it did somewhat well (like the method of blinding which is clever, but not applicable to everyone), and criticism for things it did not do well, such as designing your own study methodology for your own mood. That alone will affect the results. Simply RUNNING an experiment can affect your mood because it's interesting (or even maybe frustrating). The subject probably felt pride and satisfaction whenever they used their pill selection technique, which could improve mood on its own. Neither accolades nor complete derision are appropriate, although trying to claim too strong a result from this study is kinda deserving of derision if you claim to be science-minded.
The study was well-meaning and displayed cleverness.
And that is exactly the point made in the target post by the author. He explicitly raised that criticism himself. Double kudos for self-criticism. You will not find many conventional science publications pointing out: “Shucks, we could have done this a better”.
The ancestor post is neither a "Complete injustice" nor "derision" nor an "insult", and it doesn't warrant a hostile mocking reply. Its tone could have been gentler, but it wasn't that bad. And the study doesn't really deserve "accolades", it deserves to be recognized for whatever it does well. Such polarization of tone and vocabulary doesn't accomplish much, and I'll even propose that it actually prevents good things from happening. It is good that the author is aware of, and acknowledges, the problems in the study. What other studies and journals have done wrong doesn't make the author or study more deserving of praise.
Also, you asked why he said "unblinded", and I think you now have the answer to that.
Yes, perhaps. But please tell me you have read the original post. It is thoughtful, self-deprecatory, careful, well analyzed, and upfront about limitations and possible improvements.
Re-reading such a negative critique of a solid home-brew experiment is unwarranted. There are several word here worth red flags.
>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 much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.
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.
If your sample is blinded yet you consistently guess correctly, then presumably either 1. you failed at blinding or 2. there is a strong and discernible effect, regardless of what your other metrics might say (your other metrics could always be flawed after all).
> 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
Assuming the blinded samples are uniformly randomly distributed, and assuming the study goes on long enough, then you'd expect that stuff to average out.
But I agree, it should be recorded nonetheless. That way you can verify at the end that it did, in fact, average out as you expected. If it didn't then your data is invalid.
He has 94 data points. Not nearly enough to average out so many potentially confounding variables, and there is no way to know they would. That will be the case in almost all N=1 experiments. Perhaps he takes the pill at the onset of stress, and stress almost always tends to build afterwards. This would be a probable case for many people trying to use theanine in this way. I could never accept that we should presume it would average out, and thus I consider logging potentially confounding variables essential to a valid experiment of this type of uncontrolled experiment. Your hypothesis would be much more relevant in a larger experiment of course.
> Perhaps he takes the pill at the onset of stress, and stress almost always tends to build afterwards.
That would not be a problem regarding the averaging I referred to, although it could well pose a problem for measurement depending on how it interacted with the selected metrics.
Note that the averaging I refer to is not regarding all possible values of some metric, but rather any discrepancy in the distribution of metrics which we expected to follow the same distribution between the sample and the control.
I think maybe there's a misunderstanding? It seems that we both agree that a variety of additional variable should be logged. I was not suggesting to omit them, but rather to use discrepancies in them to detect fundamental issues with the data or study design. I would also expect larger studies to do the same where possible.
At 94 data points it is entirely possible that there would be outliers that would have averaged out for a larger N but did not. In such a scenario the presence of such outliers should then be taken to indicate a problem with the data (ie the more discrepancies you observe, the less you should trust the data).
I was mainly saying I don't understand why you were indicating we should presume or expect they would average out in an N=1 experiment. Even in much larger experiments that is not reliably the case. Science would be relatively easy if there were not a lot of noise in the real world. So, to be clear, my concern is mainly one of scale - the experiment is far too restricted to overlook this: the smaller the experiment, the more important this type of information. Perhaps you were not saying that such averaging might be possible in an N=1 experiment and I misread, since it seems that you comment here indicates a different point.
I of course agree that logging them is basic scientific methodology - in order to detect issues with the experiment, and even hopefully to see the signal through the noise.
> 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?
It gives a hint of how well the blinding worked.
Yes, that is a good point. But it also causes him to continuously think about indicators to determine what he has taken. He is constantly trying to punch the veil on this "blind" study instead of doing everything he can to avoid that. Are they really the exact same weight? Do they really feel the same in his hand, mouth and throat? Does one have a slightly different taste - after all, no filling process will leave the outside of the capsule 100% free of powder, etc? Very subtle differences could manifest themselves over 16 months.
If you ever wonder why some folks with a fair amount of potential and something to offer keep to themselves, this isn't the worst example.
I think most people could criticize the carbon out of a corpse if they themselves weren't being criticized into one.
If we devolved from apes, maybe apes devolved from piranhas.
hilarious
> 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.
N=1 is addressed, see outcome predictions. N=1 comes with caveats, of course, but a study like this, with a proven harmless supplement, should be welcomed and praised.
It is clearly a step forward from what you can watch about theanine on YouTube or TikTok. I consider this a work of citizen science. While it should not be taken for more than it is, it’s a great example of how someone can experiment without a high burden.
N=1 studies aren’t evil. They’re just pretty close to the entire history of pre-modern medicine that led us to bad evidence. My concern here is not that someone is sharing their opinions, it’s the fact that the person doing this explicitly heaps derision on the “placebo people” (or some other phrasing) and then heaps praise on other people doing N=1 studies and proceeds to do one. This stuff all needs to be treated with humor, good faith, and then extreme skepticism about any result it produces.
That's a pretty low bar though. OK, it's one step up from a monetized YouTube video that boils down to "It works--Trust me, bro." I still wouldn't really call it citizen science.
Noooooo you can’t just run independent experiments you need institutions and phds and bureaucracy and gold plating nooooo
These smug pilots have lost touch with the down-to-earth lives and concerns of ordinary passengers like us. Let's see a show of hands: who thinks I should fly the plane?
You should link to the source of your quote.
Arguably so, but all I can find are other plagiarized copies. :-P
The New Yorker's paywall has successfully obscured the origin of the joke, so that's on them, as far as I'm concerned.
Yes.
Well, instead of an actual web link, you could just mention that it's from the New Yorker.
"It's from the New Yorker. The most important magazine of our time. Probably the most important magazine that ever was."
(From a vaguely-remembered 1990s-era ad campaign that I thought was excruciatingly self-indulgent at the time, but which evidently worked.)
It’s not about elitism. It’s that there are so many confounding factors that even a well-informed approach makes such a study comtain very little of value
Comments like yours expose a particularly distasteful amount of hubris.
You don’t like it you don’t have to read the blog article. I assure you are not the intended audience. For the rest of us it provided valuable insight.
In science, an n=1 experiment isn’t discarded; instead, it adds information that can guide future experiments.
Hell, I'd say it's an 0<=N<1 because it involves subjective mood reporting, and there was no participant who was not contaminated by flaws in the methodology.
You could argue that this N is the only N that matters though.
Not too me though. Especially not to me if I'm trying to decide to supplement l-theanine
Right. The only N that you can draw any conclusions about is the author himself. So, why even publish it? The "results" are not applicable to anyone reading it. This is the health version of the software industry's "It works on my system!"
Publish it is quite a loaded word here. Almost every blog or post you read is from the point of view of a single person. There's nothing wrong with him putting his experience out into the world.
N=1 trial is great if you are trying to figure out what works for you as an individual
>Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better.
This is only an appropriate criticism in so far as you want to make conclusions about theanine as an intervention in the broader population.
It is however, perhaps much BETTER than large N trials if the author wishes to draw conclusions about how theanine affects THEM.
Why do you say pseudo blinding, it seems like it is blind in that the author doesn’t know if he is taking the test or not.
Now you can argue that there isn’t enough time between samples, or he needs more subjects but he was blind to whether he was taking it that day or not.
If the author felt good on a particular day for whatever reason, and then learned they had taken the active substance, their reports are contaminated forever. It works the other way, too. It works any way you slice it.
> This is an N=1 trial
Sure, OP addressed that and said it would be especially useful more people did it and "if we find a way to collectively interpret the data".
Aye. Completely agree. Path dependence matters, which is why you can't just look at pre/post action.
Any experiment you perform on yourself has N=1. Self-science isn't as robust as gold standard double blind blablabla PhD trials, but come on.
How else are you going to find out whether a particular diet or medication works for you specifically? It's ALWAYS N=1.
And a honest n=1 is better than a double blind n=1000 but outcome-interested study. It’s so easy to make data tell the story you want.
Citizens science used to be much more common and there were several publications initially built around the concept. Unfortunately, the idea has all but been obliterated by inadequate public education and the chronic lack of time that now embattles the middle classes.
fortunately* citzen science was replaced by solid methods... this is a long fancy self reported post on a metric that is easily figured out by biomarkers (stress levels). what's the consequences if the author decided to make some claim about a substance?
I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s. It was never a replacement for professional science, but rather citizen scientists often observed things that were deemed worth of follow-up by academic researchers.
Citizens scientists rarely post “facts” but rather interesting avenues for research or further investigation. Part of being an educated citizen scientist is to understand the limitations of your knowledge, data, and methods.
Quacks and cranks, on the other hand, are always making grand new “discoveries” lol.
Anyone who has a decent education can make observations apply the scientific method. I say this coming from a family of actual scientists from molecular biology to particle physics, who will tell you the same, and also give credit to the multitude of citizen scientists who have done just that.
As for myself, I’ll stick to engineering.
i think anyone researching whatever in their home is doing 'science'
but this isn't the case! i linked in an answer to my post what science knows when measuring stress... it's far away from a self-reported subjective question
i think the problem is whatever you post on the internet is politic. it may have a huge reach, and so far so good people trying far from lethal doses of theanine. now, what if an influencer wants to make their stuff look intellectual and go buy pure caffeine? how about the people coming after wards?
one thing is a 3D-print project at your garage on keyboards ergonomics, home automation, another is rock-climbing gear and another is substances with reachable lethal doses where the masses can buy (not the case here but again, i cited caffeine but there's much more). the author has a stellar presentation but they seriously researched what science does when measuring stress? they didn't even considered The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), which is used on professional research. i stand against public posts with badly methods (or the complete lack of research) suppressed by fancy graphics on substance use/abuse. i also bet isn't that hard to buy empty pills with opaque color
>I think you are ignoring the fact that citizen science was alive and very well up into the 1980s.
Some version of that still exists among people with a naturalist bent recording observations of reptiles, birds, plants, etc. But yeah, we don't really have backyard chemists analyzing things anymore.
Astronomy also has an important citizen-science component, and many discoveries are made by amateur astronomers each year.
Another interesting aspect of citizen science is replication of existing scientific research, Often with experimental modifications that make the experiment much more approachable for amateurs. Sometimes this even leads to process improvements that facilitate industrial application.
couldn't edit but here it's how science measure stress: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8434839/
> So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?
I think what the author is saying is that for them to bother with theanine on a permanent basis, it would have to have shown an effect large enough to be apparent just from plotting.
In other words, they mean technical significance as opposed to clinical significance. A small effect can be statistically verifiable without being meaningful in practice.
But before we take the measured effects at face value, I think it's important think about them more. They report significant p values of their success in predicting if the capsule holds Theanine and also for the effect of the capsule when it holds Theanine. Both negative correlations. My first thought reading this is that the Placebo tasted more like Theanine and thinking they took Theanine had a positive effect on the outcome.
>> Technically, I did find two significant results.
The problem is that he is comparing two very different things, the level when he took the pill and the level one hour after that. So it's not surprising that they are different. Let's imagine a very very very stupid experiment, where the problem is more obvious.
Does Coca Cola or Pepsi improve luck? N=1000000, double blind randomized controlled trial.
1) Each subject flips a coin. tail=0, head=1.
2) They drink a glas of soda, 50% Coke or 50% Pepsi, that is served in a hidden place and nor the subject or the experimenter know which one.
3) They roll a dice (an usual one, D6)
Results:
* Average before Coke = 0.5002
* Average after Coke = 3.5005
* Average before Pepsi = 0.5004
* Average after Pepsi = 3.5003
So the conclusion is that Coke improves the average (p<1E-a-lot) and Pepsi improves the average (p<1E-a-lot). Both are "technically" statistically significant (but it's caused by a horrible experiment design).
Unsurprisingly, the difference in the average after drinking Coke or Pepsi is not statistically significant (p<.something).
(I'm too lazy to run a simulation now, but it's not difficult to get realistic averages and p values.)
In conclusion, the useful result is the comparison of the anxiety after taking both drugs, not the difference of before and after taking them.
As the article says:
>> So I propose a new rule: Blind trial or GTFO.
I think is great that folk self observe, and that is a key to a lot, everyone ought to find what works for themselves, however there is a tendency to want to fix things with pills. There is a fundamental error there, if successful you might damp your symptoms but then you start a Whac-A-Mole (whac-a-symptom) but you are not looking at the root. The problem will come in another form. Have you consider that the symptom is a defence mechanism ?What about Taichi, mindfulness ness practices, yoga why not a study on that? It is definitely more work… than taking some pills. No I am not against taking supplements. But ultimately is a workaround you are not fixing the bug
I’m not sure if this is your intention, but I take issue with the implication that “pills” (aka “medication” and “medicine,” “pills” has a generally negative connotation) aren’t often the solution to the root problem.
It is great if you can solve things with diet, mindfulness, etc. But sometimes you need medical intervention and yes sometimes that means you need to take medication in the form of pills. There are millions of people who need that regardless of how they change their lifestyle or regulate their emotions/mental health without them.
Basically I don’t like the idea that you are implying medication is a bandaid and not ever the actual solution. If I misreading your comment my apologies
This is good point, thank you, lot of people needs medicine, and i am glad they are accesible. My point goes more towards this: Imagine someone runs a marathon everyday, after a couple of months, start experiencing pain and inflammation. Do they need painkillers or do they need to ask themselves why they are running a marathon everyday? I am not against taking some painkillers as long as you also ask yourself the question. Do i really need to run a marathon everyday? I do not want to cure disease with yoga, no, but you should give it a go, whatever works for you, self observe, train a bit, walk in the forest, surf, meditate. Wellbeing cannot be achieved only with medicine.
Fair point! Thanks for clearing that up for me
The strawman sentiment of "no medication ever" is a pretty easy take to herald against.
The nuanced truth is that our medical industry is flawed; since most illnesses are defined by their set of apparent symptoms (with most root causes not fully understood) the standard approach is to treat "symptoms" with medicines with sides effects rivaling the original ailment!
What if the lack of proper diet ('proper' varies wildly with populations), drugs/alcohol, sleep, stress, and exercise were the originating cause? Rushing to the medication treatment without fixing those vitals first eliminates the opportunity.
Our bodies have much more adaptive self-healing resilience properties innate to our species development than our own species hubris seems to acknowledge. And most people severely underestimate the importance big four.
“Technically” here could imply “not corrected for multiple tests”. But the typical qualifier I use is “nominally significant” when I don’t apply an correction for multiple tests.
Or “not using a one-way t test”.
The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
What impressed me most is the suggestion for an improved experimental design to remove his temporal drift by using 100 pre-loaded envelopes and only decoding the results at the end.
> The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
I disagree with this. You have a prior belief that theanine might reduce anxiety; if you wanted to you could codify that subjective belief and perform some variety of Bayesian hypothesis test [1] and compute a Bayes factor. The main reason that one-sided tests are advocated for is power; that is often the same as having a prior belief in disguise. Why not quantify it?
However, scientifically, if the data conclusively show that "theanine increases anxiety" that is a meaningful, non-artefactual result: it is hugely important to be sensitive to the answer 'you are wrong' and may well ironically spur development in a direction to help understand what is going on. I personally think that one sided tests are best avoided except in the case where it is physically impossible to have an effect in the other direction. Examples of this are rare, but they do occasionally exist.
[1] https://mspeekenbrink.github.io/sdam-book/ch-Bayes-factors.h...
Sure. I can see your point, but the most reasonable posterior probability of the null given the biohacker community’s belief is one-tailed. This also gives more power to reject the null.
> The most appropriate null hypothesis in this lovely study is “does theanine REDUCE anxiety”, not “does theanine change anxiety either up or down”.
Neither of those is a hypothesis, which require a prediction not just a question.
The null hypothesis for this experiment would be "Theanine has no effect on stress".
Really fantastic.
I've been using theanine for a long time, but never for any of these purported benefits. And the benefits I do use it for would be near impossible to measure. I just use it to make a over-caffinated monkey brain state tend toward a "lock-in" mental state. That's super hard to measure, and just as likely the theanine is a trigger for a mental deep dive that could just as well be sugar. But the ritual works, and that's what's important to me. It just took the intial "It helps mellow out caffeine for deep focus" idea to establish the ritual.
Science? No. Effective? Yeah, I think so.
They were looking for a clear effect. they did not find one.
>Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.
The entire blog post was anecdotal.
From what I've seen, most scientists don't even publish their raw data.
Well the issue is that an experiment with 1 person can’t prove much because you can’t have a control group.
Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects.
You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later.
Excellent data and statistics is not sufficient for a good experiment
An experiment of 1 person can very well produce useful data.
It depends on the setup of the experiment.
Imagine an experiment where a person's thumb gets randomly hit with either a hammer or a feather once per day. And they then subjectively rate the experience. After 1000 days of collecting data, I doubt that we would wrongly come to the conclusion that the hammer treatment leads to the nicer outcome.
The setup of the Theanine experiment which is the basis of this thread looks good on first sight. I have the feeling that the interpretation could use more thought though.
Yes and no. The issue with a self-administered experiment is that becomes part of the experiment. Does the self-administration and the associated thoughts and beliefs affect the results? It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.
>It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.
TFA describes a protocol for doing just that. The author randomly selected between the treatment dose and placebo. They didn't reveal the choice until after the effect should be complete so they could record the results.
A problem I see is that you can never be sure that it also works for other people. Just because one person reacts to a specific treatment does not mean that people on average react to the treatment in the same way. That’s the problem of having a sample size of 1. In other words: We cannot say much about whether the effect generalizes to a larger population from knowing that it has an affect on just one person.
It’s very possible that some things can be good for one person and not for another. Should we only ever have drugs that can help everyone?
A similar, actually useful, experiment is the one where a guy cracked the knuckles of only one hand for several years and found no ill effects from doing so compared to the other hand with non-cracked knuckles.
Then you find {imagining scenarios} that the bruising causes some effect that 'inoculates' against heart disease, or the feather carries a pathogen that later induces dementia??
What a weird take, in 99.999% of cases you don’t have such a black/white contrast
Sure. But even when you add noise to the described experiment, you get useful data.
That is the point I am making: Experiments of a single person can be useful.
The critics of single person experiments usually come up with examples vastly different than the Theanine experiment described here. With long term experiments which are only conducted once. But the Theanine experiment was looking for a short term effect and can be conducted many times. The hammer experiment I made up would be an extreme example of this type of experiment which leads itself well to be conducted by a single person.
What I am trying to point out is that if you are a skeptic, it would be better to try and find weaknesses in the experiment at hand. Not making up completely different experiments.
i hope your 1 person isn't a masochist
The experiment answers a useful question: does theanine have a strong, acute anti-stress effect on the experimenter?
Effect size is the key element of this question. If the substance was alprazolam (Xanax) instead of theanine, we would almost certainly see a strong effect here. The same would be true for heroin, ethanol, or cocaine.
It's not trying to test whether there might be a strong effect for most people or whether there are any side effects. Other experiments have been done with theanine seeking to answer those questions; the answers appear to be no and no.
> Too much other stuff is changing in a single persons life that could account for all observed side effects.
> You also have latent side effect issues. A person could smoke for 10 years, not smoke for another 10, and then conclude that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then they get lung cancer 20 years later.
But that's not the actual experiment here. Your criticism is invalid. The author randomised every day which supplement to take.
That's pretty close to a blocked design.
Your self-tracking syntax looks neat. How do you track if you are not in front of a computer?
I write into a text file on my phone. And later move those lines into the file on my computer.
It's a bit cumbersome, but not too much. But yeah, I look forward to when I finally get around to writing an app for it.
do you use an app and shortcuts (or something similar) to speed this up?
On the phone I don't.
In Vim, I use multiple shortcuts that I made for this use case.
You can use vim via termux, which is nice when you already have things in version control.
Alternatively, may I suggest the DailyLog app in F-Droid?
I found, I take Abt. 4 days to react to stuff. Except for those cheap cooking oils, I get migraines within a time-frame of about 3 hrs.
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.
Been using antihistamines, and a dehumidifier for several months now and sleeping better than I have in years. Given how extremely common mite allergies are there's got to be a lot of folks with undiagnosed issues here.
You should consider a dust mite vacuum with UV. I bought one on Amazon (this one but you can check YouTube reviews for others).
https://www.amazon.com/JIGOO-Vacuum-Cleaner-Dust-Sensor/dp/B...
I was surprised how much dust this thing picked up (my sheets get washed often, but it’s hard to clean the mattress itself). Back in the day people used to sun dry their mattresses but no one does that these days.
This dust mite vacuum picked up half a canister of gunk from my dead skin and environmental dust that has accumulated over the years (and it has a light scattering sensor that tells you how much dust is being sucked up). My nose was clear after sleeping on a vacuumed bed. I now vacuum my bed once a week, and it has really helped.
Vacuuming your bed and other fabric surfaces also feels therapeutic. For me, it’s like watching one of those powerwashing videos. You feel cleansed after.
Vacuuming one's bed makes complete sense to me, but what is special about the model you linked to that makes it specifically a 'mattress' vacuum cleaner? Many canister vacuum cleaners are more powerful and can be used elsewhere in the home too (with a different attachment for hygiene, of course). There's the UV light, but I can't see how this is effective when used only for short periods of time. The dust won't be removed with it and the mites will withstand it too.
Not wanting to make you feel bad about your purchase, but is there something unique about this kind of device that gives it an edge over conventional vacuum cleaners?
You can use a conventional vacuum if it has enough suction (most of these dust mite vacuums are rated at 13 kPa, a sweet spot for extraction without damaging fabric), and if you don’t mind using the same vacuum attachment on other surfaces. These also have rotating polyurethane fins that go close to the surface which helps in agitation — most vacuum attachments have plastic brushes which I suppose will do the job but possibly slightly less effectively.
It’s not a mattress vacuum so much as a dust mite vacuum that can be used on couches, fabric chairs etc. It’s also handheld and is specialized for the job, so it’s more ergonomic to hold.
The UV I can’t really vouch for but can’t hurt. I personally would not run a conventional vacuum on my mattress because I use the same vacuum on less hygienic surfaces, but if you have a dedicated attachment why not — I feel it would be less effective (because in my experience, the suction is often diminished when you use an attachment) but have no data. If you have a high end vacuum this is less of a factor, but most low end vacuums like Hoovers aren’t designed to deliver full suction with attachments.
I’m happy with my purchase because I feel that given it’s small size, I’m more likely to vacuum more frequently. I’m less likely to want to bust out the big vacuum.
I jumped on the idea but then immediately came to the same conclusion. Now I’m thinking I stick with the vac(s) I have, but get a separate UV. And UV the bed while I’m working. Maybe?
Your thoughts?
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.
I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)?
I think the problem would be temperature control, as you don't want to damage the item, but need to maintain an even, specific air temperature, you'd need turbulence. Then vacuum clean afterwards.
Maybe a wallpaper remover style device with a hot air source instead of steam??
Yeh I've thought about whether it'd be possible/safe to use something like an "overclocked" electric blanket to sterilize the mattress daily.
They also need humidity (~50% RH), hence why I got the dehumidifer, which has definitely knocked them back.
I got the exact same idea sadly most electric blanket i could find on amazon where kinda small and had disappointingly low heating power...
Pretty much my conclusion as-well.
I guess they just don't want folks giving themselves burns during sleep.
AliExpress as always is tempting [1], but you'd have to be incredibly careful about regulating temperature [2] and adding safety interlocks that'd make falling asleep with it active, or forgetting to turn it off impossible.
1. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007963462500.html
2. Don't blame me when your house burns down, I warned you.
Look into something like flexwatt tape. Maybe run it during the day when your not sleeping. In my mind, they probably use something similar inside heated blankets with some kind of limiter/thermostat.
Do your research though!! I'm not sure if flexwatt tape could ignite your mattress, but you would definitely want to know for sure yourself beforehand!
There are ways to control heat though; I'm familiar with using flexwatt tape with reptile enclosures, hooked up to a thermostat with a probe in the habitat for temp control. Maybe some math, like desired_temp = watts_supplied * feet_of_fw_tape, where the watts_supplied is the independent variable you adjust based on the required feet_of_fw_tape for your mattress to get the dependent variable desired_temp. Probably include a fail safe, but I'm no electrician, proceed at your own risk.
They do sell self contained fire extinguishers you can hang on your ceiling that deploy automatically at a certain temperature, ideally putting out fire sources they are hung above. Nice to have around for things like this.
nice another project to the pile ;p
>I read that mites can't survive temperatures above 60C, and wondered then about just a big plastic bag around the item then fill it from a hot air source (hair dryer, fan heater)?
People do something similar to kill bedbugs, I think they make specialized equipment to do so, but it might just be something like an off the shelf heat gun.
Just a data point. I have a mattress encasement which has never been removed (I got it to protect against bedbugs). Dust (dead human skin) still accumulates on the surface. It might not go into the mattress, but it will be on the surface. Since the encasements are never meant to be removed, vacuuming the mattress (with encasement on) still makes sense.
I asked above as well, but since you have direct experience, what do you have between the plastic and you? Aside from the fitted sheet? Wouldn’t a regular mattress cover just attract mites as well?
It’s just the fitted sheet.
The encasement I have is actually not a plastic wrap but a zippered tight weave synthetic fabric (polyester).
https://a.co/d/3ut09wO
It’s suppose to prevent bedbugs and others from setting up shop inside the mattress but the surface is fair game. The idea being it’s easier to clean the surface than the insides.
I have had the encasement for years. No problems with humidity but I also live in a less humid area (41-45% rh all year round).
So a dust mite vaccuum still makes sense.
Also interesting fact: dust mites themselves are harmless to humans. It’s their fecal matter (after digesting our dead skin) that are allergens.
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.
This causes mold by trapping humidity. Had to throw out a latex mattress be careful with full plastic.
This causes mold on mattresses due to humidity. I had to throw out a latex mattress.
I doubt a bit of UV on a vacuum does anything to a mite. They're kinda like spiders with a hard shell after all. One study [1] found you need one hour of hard UV-C exposure to kill most mites. That would probably also degrade the textiles and foam of your mattress, and probably does not even reach most mites/eggs in between threads and foam pores.
1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3609379/
Obviously there are different species of dust mites, but the ones I'm familiar with are nearly invincible. They are able to cling onto smooth surfaces even with a vacuum cleaner right over them. I've noticed that they are 'directional' in their grip though: when the vacuum cleaner is behind their direction of travel, they'll hold fast, but if you move the vacuum in front of them they'll be sucked up. Thus, drawing the vacuum nozzle back and forth repeatedly seems to me to be essential for reliably getting rid of them.
As for UV, I have no idea. They seem to survive on surfaces that get exposed to sunlight though windows, but apparently glass blocks most UV radiation. You'll have to make a new post with your results if you try it :)
Got to say after figuring this out I am tempted to ditch the western style mattress and replace it with something like a Japanese futon. I assume it'd be much easier to wash.
In the meantime I need to purchase a mattress encasement, I put one on my pillow and that alone helped a bunch.
Long term maybe desensitization is an option but I'm too lazy for that atm.
I did a desensitization and it helped a little bit. Despite the regular washing and using a dust mite vacuum I'm still having a hard time getting good sleep though. At least my nose isn't bloody in the morning anymore, so I guess that's something.
In my country we used to use woolen matresses, which would be completely emptied and washed twice a year, and the wool would be dried in the sun for a good two days, then whipped with a long stick for couple hours, and then filled back in the washed cover again. Nowadays it's very rare unfortunately.
Great example of forgotten cultural wisdom, absolutely would have reduced dust mite pressure.
It's just a vacuum with an HEPA filter, correct ?
I had the same experience, it just occurred to me that I could vaccum the mattress with the for-textile head and was really surprised with the amount of dust and its texture (transparent dust holder is satisfying hehe)
Is there a reason to get this over a waterproof bed bug protector? Which you can wash.
> Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth
I would suggest people look for this symptom first before jumping onto nasal corticosteroids.
Fluticasone and others have low systemic absorption and low side effects in theory, but there are several studies that found some suppression of the HPA axis similar to taking small doses of oral corticosteroids like prednisone. The effect is small, but I wouldn’t suggest trying it out as a 1-month experiment unless you have specific symptoms of stuffy nose in the mornings.
“Before trying a basic mineral with no side effects, try a corticosteroid for a whole month”
??? You have that backwards.
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 hypersensitivity.
This article is a great introduction to the harms they cause at the molecular level: https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(18)30848-0/ful...
I also wrote a free guide to help people get dust mites out of their house:
https://dustmiteguide.com
I’m really glad to see this side discussion on dust mite allergy happening here. I’ve had dust mite allergy since childhood, and I even had adenoid removal surgery at age ~7 to address it. Nothing seems to help.
I think dust mite allergy imitates some of the symptoms of sleep apnea, because your nasal passage gets blocked at night, waking you in a similar way to choking.
I’ve reached my mid-30s, largely ignoring the symptoms, but over the past few months I’ve been experiencing a truly terrible bout of insomnia.
I think it’s time to take the allergy seriously again. I’ll follow your guide and make some changes. If I could suggest an improvement to your guide: it may be useful to have a section (perhaps chapter 5?) on symptom relief. I’ve had friends say that a neti pot works wonders, for example.
Either way thanks for posting!
There's an interesting "subcategory" of sleep apnea under the moniker of UARS. I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of folks in that community actually have allergenic rhinitis (or structural issues).
I actually had a home sleep study done before I figured out it was allergies. Came back negative for OSA but my RIP [1] band data showed a lot of paradoxical breathing and flow limitation indicating significant respiratory effort. So more or less struggling to breathe all night long.
The poor sleep quality really destroys your quality of life.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_inductance_plethys...
Appreciate the resource -- I think my biggest question from reading it: How can you actually tell if you have dust mite problems? How can you tell if they've gotten better or not? How can I tell if I've hit a point where things are about as good as they're going to get? etc.
I have asthma symptoms from dust mites, and discovered that sniffing items creates a reaction in my lungs that is pretty sensitive to the amount of allergen in the item. Dust mite allergens also have a distinct but subtle smell you can learn.
Regarding whether or not your health issues are caused by dust mites, if you have any of the allergic disease, or if you have a tested dust mite allergy, it is likely they are causing problems. Disease severity is also associated with dust mite exposure.
Basically, the worse you have allergies, the more likely it's dust mites.
It's an almost certainty you home has dust mites and their allergens, unless you live in a very dry climate.
My advice is to create conditions in your house in which dust mites cannot thrive, which is relatively easy to verify with hygrometers. Over time, this will lead to lead to lower allergen levels, particularly if you are proactive about removing the ones that are currently there.
Another simple hack is to exit your outside the home outer clothes when you get home. There are virulent extra allergic dust mites, that has really helped my family. And these products can help with laundry at lower temps and harder to launder items. https://elfbrands.com/collections/elf-brands
I tried to send a message to your the feedback email address on your dustmite guide site but gmail told me it was undeliverable because the address was not found.
What I emailed about was asking what you meant by biweekly for washing bedding - is that twice a week or every other week?
In the early days, populations of eggs and protonymphs are high and perhaps you haven't learned to control humidity in different weather conditions, washing 2x a week will be effective imho.
But if you can maintain low humidity for a longer periods, the dust mite populations in your home will go down and frequent washing will be less important.
thanks for letting me know my email fwding is not working. Twice a week. Be sure to wash as hot as your machine can do. I found that the highest setting on my front loading LG washer does 158f and is more effective than the next hottest setting.
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.
Antihistamines could even work without any allergy since they are typically used as mild sleeping aids. They are also used often off-label for stress reduction. [0]
[0] https://fherehab.com/learning/surprising-antihistamine-anxie...
I find the steroids even more effective but they seem to exacerbate my anxiety after a few days though. Still haven't figured that out.
With regular use antihistamines quite quickly lose their drowsiness effects. But it's definitely a nice side effect for sleeping challenged folks. Azelastine is a second generation antihistamine so not particularly drowsiness inducing.
One of the interesting Azelastine quirks, is it's apparently somewhat antiviral [1].
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38140540
Cortisone is the main stress hormone, of course it makes you anxious
> Prolonged use can lead to increased tolerance, reduced effectiveness, and potential side effects.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/should-i-worry-...
> Theoretically, these drugs might increase the risk of dementia by blocking a particular brain neurotransmitter or increasing brain inflammation. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that these pills might increase the risk of dementia, while other studies have found no risk. And all the studies are inherently flawed.
Only Anticholinergic drugs appear to be associated dementia (but as noted the evidence is very weak).
Older first generation antihistamines such as Diphenhydramine (Benadryl), Doxylamine (Nyquil) have substantial Anticholinergic activity.
A lot of the second generation antihistamines have no significant Anticholinergic activity, eg. Azelastine.
Benadryl and Nyquil are terrible drugs. Why they haven't been phased out is beyond me. At least Azelastine is now OTC in the USA.
Correct me if I'm wrong, desloratadine won't pass the BBB so I guess it shouldn't cause dementia
Desloratadine is considered to have a low anticholinergic burden, and of course not crossing the BBB readily should reduce risks further.
But it is one of the more anticholinergic second gen antihistamines, make of that what you will, still miles behind something like Benadryl. Fexofenadine is apparently a less anticholinergic alternative.
I think that was Diphenhydramine (benadryl) that may have that long term risk via being an Anticholinergic.
Thanks, but I'm still missing how I would properly diagnose myself. These symptoms might be all too common ... Anything more reliable?
You can always go to an allergist for a skin prick test.
I'd say hallmark symptom would be chronic night time congestion worsening while in bed (an area of the house that has a very high density of mite allergen).
But running a bit of differential diagnosis on this,
* Inflammatory & Allergic Conditions (allergic/non-allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, turbinate hypertrophy, nasal polyps).
* Obstructive Sleep Apnea (do a STOP-BANG).
* Structural Blockages & Airway Obstructions (deviated septum, adenoid/tonsil hypertrophy, nasal valve collapse, turbinate hypertrophy).
* Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD/LPR).
An allergy clinic can run these tests for you.
Been doing immunotherapy for allergies for 3 years and it is a complete game changer. Last year was the first year I could breathe through my nose for the entire year. No more stuffy months.
Wouldn't changing the matress help? Also, if you using a pillow, consider keep them under the sun every few days. You can even keep the matress under the sun, maybe on the terrace if you have access to it. Pillows can also be washed as well.
Telling you from my own experience. It could work for you if you haven't tried already.
There's sweet FA sun for six months out of the year here in central europe so not a viable option.
You are aware of mattress covers for Dust Mites? And there is an enzyme additive for laundry. Finally a hand steamer for upholstered stuff. I had bad hives from allergies to them, and a medical resident suggested a clearing of all fabric in my life, as best as I could.
I have asthma triggered by Volatile Organic Compounds. I good activated charcoal room air filter did wonders for me.
Incidentally, the author made an (counter-)review of air purifiers : https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/
I got the IKEA purifier with the activated charcoal filter after reading that
Indoor air quality these days is particularly awful.
Was reading that house dust is actually a major source of microplastics aswell.
Thanks for this idea. Can you recommend a particular model? A quick search found mostly just vacs. I have a vac(s). Perhaps I just get in the habit of treating my bed with UV?
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-experimentation:
Werner Forssmann performed the first heart catheterization on himself. He got the Nobel prize.
Barry Marshal injected himself with heliobacter pylori to prove that it causes stomach ulcers. Also got the Nobel prize.
Jessie Lazear allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with yellow fever to prove his hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for transmission. No Nobel prize, but he did contract the disease, thus proving his hypothesis…before dying from yellow fever two weeks later.
>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.
Through the arm, I believe, is still the way it’s performed today!
Nobel candidates cannot be deceased.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMDA_receptor
While reading, I was wondering about matcha, and then I saw your comment -- which jives with my personal experience too! Thanks for chiming in :)
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.
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't get jittery.
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.
> Stimulant medication, the kind prescribed by the doc, easily makes me jittery, too.
How do you treat your ADHD then?
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.
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.
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.
Part of that is probably withdrawal, I would think.
experiencing withdrawal symptoms seems to me quite different than regular use having a positive benefit
I would say it's both. "booting up" and starting to be a productive human in the morning happens smoothly as I have my coffee :)
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)
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'm the same. I've taken caffeine pills and not noticed it. I can also just drink tea/coffee and then sleep.
200mg, I feel nothing. 300mg, my heart races some, but still no jitters or anxiety.
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.
It's not only the jittery but caffeine also tends to make people more anxiety, l-theanine mostly takes that away.
The author had caffeine "90% of the time", see this comment: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/theanine/comment/98488776
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.
That one's been tested. It's why it is in a lot of energy drinks. The stuff isn't cheap, you wouldn't add it for no or unsure benefit.
Would've been interesting if OP had tested that combo specifically, maybe comparing theanine + caffeine to just caffeine alone in a blinded setup
"The journalist effect" is at play here.
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’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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
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.
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.
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?
Assortative mating. Partners' genetics are not independent.
Even more crazy than caffeine interaction.
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.
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.
How about other ingredients in coffee?
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
Polyphenols...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8601035/
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.
Coffee is a significant source of beta-carbolines.
I read a study about athletes given either a strong coffee, placebo, or a caffeine in capsule form. The study suggested that even if coffee had less caffeine than athletes got directly in a capsule (and measured in their blood) strong coffee boosted their performance more. This suggests that we might be getting a boost from sensing strong flavor by our receptors. Not sure how else to interpret it, but I really wish there would be more studies on this.
Anecdotally I feel way more productive while I'm sipping coffee than I am once I've finished my cup. This is true even after my first sips.
I think we humans just really really like ritualistic practices.
there is more in coffee than caffeine? maybe another substance?
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.
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.
Are you sure it's the caffeine and not another substance in coffee?
That's a great point. Dose-response relationships can be really weird
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.
This reminds me of hydrogen sulfide that at low levels smells awful but at little higher doesn't smell at all, because it just fries receptors.
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!
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).
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
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.
I made this, it’s a lot less than $25/mo. Happy to take suggestions. It’s called Reflect.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
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
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/?show_conditions=tr...
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.
Don't those effects cancel with the effects on those participants who take the same 2 treatments but in the reverse order?
That’s why you need multiple participants and why this idea for doing experiments on just yourself doesn’t work well
Yeah, even watching the news can make your stress levels go up.
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.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...
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 much would you pay for this?
Skip the app. Make the pills.
Skip the pills. Make the app.
how do you blind the contents of the pills unless someone else does it?
>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
This would work! QR codes would be even more opaque.
Put them in numbered containers at the start of the experiment.
A device that randomly distributes pills into two chutes.
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 use Bevel for this. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bevel-health-performance/id645...
That's not blinded though right, you'd know if you were taking Vit D or not and that would corrupt the experiment
If anyone is interested in running their own self guided experiments, I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. We got in the top 3 on ProductHunt not too long ago [2], and I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [3].
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
[2] https://www.producthunt.com/products/reflect-c052fea3-a982-4...
[3] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...
Does your app make you randomize the when you do the intervention you’re tracking?
If not then almost everything you track is just a proxy for something else like how someone might only take melatonin on nights they knew they were going to sleep badly, or read in bed on nights they were already feeling good, not stressed.
Or they only take their meme supplements on days they aren’t stressed out by other things in life that make you neglect yourself, so the meme pills always correlate with good things.
It’s a major problem with Whoop’s insights feature. It needs a way to make you coin flip an intervention to be useful.
Yes, you can choose a random intervention schedule and also ABAB schedules with configurable number of phases and phase length.
Reflect integrates with Whoop and so can act as an augmented or relacement Whoop diary feature.
This sounds exactly like what I want! Alas, no Android app it seems, anyone aware of apps that do the same and are available for web or Android?
What is the feature set you're looking for? There are symptom-specific apps and track anything apps, but I'm unaware of any that combines both into a generic solution. We have a roadmap item to implement things on Android. https://changemap.co/ntl/reflect/task/9239-android-version-o...
Android app?
Android is on the roadmap, but we haven't started yet. Please comment on and upvote the issue!
https://changemap.co/ntl/reflect/task/9239-android-version-o...
This is nice. I love that people can be so rigorous and honest as well.
I just want to add that what brings my stress down (although I didn’t research it so thoroughly) is small rituals. Things to focus on, to do well, to “take a moment”. For me it’s making morning coffee. Making/baking bread, filling the dishwasher.
Maybe I’m borderline OCD. But maybe many people are and just the rituals of taking pills (actually) relieves some stress. It seems so based on the study.
Edit Fwiw, being about 20 years into my scientific career I’ve also come to prefer just looking at the data.
I know what you mean here, but valuing small rituals is normal and not anywhere in the same ballpark as OCD.
True. But for me sometimes when I’m stressed (usually related to some lack of control) I may get very precise about how the dishwasher is organized among others. It’s annoying for people around me, but at least it’s not hard drugs.
That doesn’t sound like OCD at all to me. It sounds like you have a personality that values order and control over details. Annoying perhaps, but normal.
If it’s getting to the point where it impedes your social life, you could see a psychiatrist, but I’m pretty sure the diagnosis wouldn’t be OCD.
OCD is characterized by strong feelings of anxiety which can only be temporarily subdued by compulsive, repeated behavior. The classic example is “can’t leave the house without washing hands 20 times, sometimes 40”. The anxiety is still there but slightly dampened by the compulsive ritual. If you don’t have crippling anxiety, you don’t have OCD.
Ok yeah I understand that it must be annoying to people with real OCD to read stuff like my comment. Apologies.
> It seems so based on the study.
I would argue that it does not, as we have no "no pill" baseline.
All it shows is that if the author is stressed, chances are he is less stressed one hour later.
Hmm indeed. But the no-pill is very hard to placebo.
I have a sensitive stomach, and I’ve found peppermint oil to be a fairly good supplement to help. I’ve also noticed that my stomach is more irritated when I’m anxious and stressed. The act of taking the peppermint oil, whether my stomach is acting up or not seems to be one of the biggest anxiety relievers to me.
Gwern has a large collection of blinded self-experiments. The only reason I suspect it’s not a more valued resource is that his results often contradict the popular wisdom in supplement communities.
His experiments with magnesium showed negative results: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#experiment-1
He tried LSD microdosing when the internet was convinced it was a miracle, but found no benefit and some concerning negative effects: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics#lsd-microdosing
Contrast those results with some of the unbelievably positive anecdotes you read about magnesium, fish oil, B-vitamins, or even LSD micro dosing causing life changing positive effects.
It’s well known that placebo effect is a strong driver of perceived effects of most supplements. The placebo effect becomes much stronger when people are primed to expect large effects. Not coincidentally, the people who report the most dramatic effects are often those who consume large amounts of podcasts, YouTube videos, or social media influencer content about those supplements. If someone listens to a 3-hour Huberman Lab episode where he explains how a “protocol” or supplement will do amazing things while using (and frequently misusing) lots of neurotransmitter names and underpowered mouse studies, that person might become so primed to expect those effects that they’re nearly guaranteed to happen. In a weird way, that means it does actually work for them, but it’s not necessarily because the supplant is producing the outcome. It’s because they’re so deeply primed to expect the outcome (e.g. feeling more energy, relaxing to fall asleep) that they placebo themselves into making it happen.
This site, Gwern, is really fascinating but I found it initially rather difficult to navigate and understand.
I do wish the author had provided a clear, layperson conclusion/results portion for each nootropic. For example, having read the section on fish oil, I still haven’t grasped whether the author observed positive results or not. Perhaps he is being rightfully cautious in drawing conclusions?
Their microdosing experimentation was questionable. Not methodically, it was quite thorough, but iirc they used unknown strength street blotters and derived all further experimentation from that.
As I always point out, all of the anecdotes claiming microdosing works are usually using street blotters as well, including the research papers which draw on crowdsourcing to circumvent the obvious problems with using schedule I psychedelics; and the research papers which do use better-validated dosages... don't usually turn up anything more than I did. Plus, it's 2025. If LSD microdosing really worked, after all this interest over the past 15+ years, why is there still so little good evidence?
I can't tell you why, but the fact that LSD is a schedule 1 drug with a strong stigma and that it's a drug that can't be patented will severely hamper any study efforts.
Some current theories re: microdosing efficacy that I've seen are that people who report benefits from microdosing (beyond placebo) are inadvertently self medicating ADHD symptoms, which seems plausible, given LSDs stimulant effect and 5HT2A affinity.
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.
> I've tried different L-Theanine supplements, and there's definitely a difference in quality across companies...
This could also be explained by placebo effects.
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.
> 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.
When it comes to sleep quality is as important as quantity. Higher quality 6 hours is better than 8 hours of mid sleep.
I've seen a lot of people mention theanine for relaxation, but combining it with 5-HTP for deeper sleep and vivid dreams is a new one for me
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 my interpretation, at least!
The title says "my experiment", it couldn't be any clearer and open it's about a single person's experience.
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.
> 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.
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?
Placebo only works on self perception though. If there are objective markers of disease they don’t tend to respond to placebo effects at all.
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" :-)
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?
He talks about this mean-reversion effect.
> that theanine works slowly — over the course of a few days, not hours
This was my experience. I'm not sure if that's "typical", although I've never really tried to take it like that.
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)
> I think these are the possibilities:
> Theanine works, but I got fake theanine. <…>
I’d add one more possibility: “Theanine works but I need a higher dosage to feel the effect.”
FWIW my purely anecdotal findings are that supplier does matter. Natural Factors Suntheanine gave me a noticeable effect. Nature’s way L-Theanine did not.
I used to take theanine in college, and this was my experience even over a decade ago.
Suntheanine was consistently effective and most of the other brands were seemingly inactive or unnoticable. I've always had to order online as all of the brands I've bought in store seem to be bunk.
Even still I found tolerance to rise quickly with daily theanine use.
OP took 200 mg. Tea contains 5–20 mg and people commonly report beneficial effects from tea. If 5 mg is enough for some people then surely 200 mg would be enough for anyone?
Not necessarily, there are a lot of drugs that have reduced or no effect for certain individuals. Think caffeine or alcohol tolerance.
I thought I was crazy/imagining things, but I had a similar experience. Maybe I should try Suntheanine again
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.
> 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.
That doesn’t invalidate the idea, because we’d see it happening in countries like the US, but we don’t.
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.
Boy, that hits diff these days. Just let me walk without major assistance.
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.
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.
Yes this sort of tolerance building is the norm. There’s somewhat reduced cross-tolerance so you might alternate lsd and psilocybin.
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?
I've never met anyone who think exercise doesn't make them feel good on the other hand
> 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.
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.
> I'll eat 3 Feals gummies or 1 Soul "Out of Office" quad, and it rocks me
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.
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'm not a stoner and got some good quality product and tried a lot of it, zero effects
I would assume that you got high from the THC
Try Hericium (also called Lion's Mane). It’s a mushroom with nootropic effects without the psychoactive ones. Supplement pills are freely available.
I tried the "thesis" nootropics that had these, zero effects. It's just a scam.
Since reading Gwern's essay on nootropics [1] I've wanted to experiment with theanine. Caffeine is obviously a fantastic stimulant, and I take care not to consume it too frequently (I try to limit my intake to no more than three times a week based on the research of Michael Dickens [2]).
As such, I have next to no tolerance. As great as having no tolerance is for the productivity benefits, it does have undesirable side effects. A single cup of coffee can get me twitchy and slightly shaky, and a cup of tea past noon can impact my ability to fall asleep.
A gripe I have is the lack of good research into the combination of theanine and caffeine, and I think I'd be a good candidate for a blinded test looking into it. I would like to carry one out but really do lack experience in tests of this nature.
Does anyone know any good resources for someone interested in learning how to conduct a self-study such as this, including details regarding common pitfalls?
[1]: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics [2]: https://mdickens.me/2024/04/11/caffeine_self_experiment/
There's a great podcast by Andrew Huberman on dopamine I listened to last week where he discusses theanine at the end. It's a fantastic (but 3 hour long) primer[0] for anyone wanting to learn more.
[0] https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/controlling-your-dopamin...
Ah, the Joe Rogan of medicine.
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.
Personal anecdote, Vitamin D is a horrible placebo.
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.
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.
Vitamin D3 is not a placebo at all. It 100% promotes energy quite quickly even though it takes much longer for the body to convert it to the active form. Also, its mental effect is distinctly different from that of L-theanine, like day and night. For these reasons, it's not a great candidate for comparison with L-theanine.
Unless it's the active D vitamin, it takes weeks to convert it into reserves.
Taking vitamin D once, right before bed will do nothing. Our bodies don't use it that way.
Cholecalciferol = weeks
calcidiol = hours
The conversion period strongly depends on the input dose and on available cofactors. Numerous people have reported that 5000 IU of vitamin D3 can produce energy benefits in just a few hours if one has been skipping taking it. If one is low on cofactors, or takes a low dose of D3, then I imagine it taking days or even longer as you noted.
> 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
Imagine the following variables:
* 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.
By giving these things to random people, we don't do a very good job of evaluating their effects. If something works on 10% of the population, randomly selecting participants in an experiment will never give a significant result. If something is generally safe, it seems better to experiment on yourself.
The problem this solves is that some things work on some people. Neurotransmitters are blunt instruments that do many things- and are subject to adaptation effects where you get an effect for a while then the system adjusts to the new baseline. Maybe someone out there has a deficiency and adding more helps them for a bit, other people don't have a deficiency and get no results. Other people have a deficiency, something works for a little bit, then the brain adjusts to the new levels and the effect slowly disappears.
Until we can measure the level of the physiological effect we are targeting, the n=1 experiment seems like the only real way to see what group you fall into.
The bbb works the same way in everyone, and prevents it from working. If it did work in 10%, you would see a positive result.
>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.
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?
> 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 likely related to increased sympathetic activity.
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.
Caffeine sensitivity varies widely, as does sensitivity to most substances.
The biggest takeaway for me is how unreliable our subjective sense of "this works" can be without proper controls. Also, the way placebo + regression to the mean can make almost anything seem effective in the moment
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.
>One study they review found that theanine worked better than alprazolam (xanax) for acute anxiety. The correct response would be, “That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion casts doubt on everything.” But the review sort of takes it at value and moves on.
“That’s impossible, and the fact that normal scientific practices could lead to such a conclusion reveals why we don't use single studies to draw conclusions as it's not only possible but expected that some percentage of study results are going to be well outside 2 standard deviations from the mean.”
I just wanna nitpick that because one of my pet peeves is people not realizing that you can follow the scientific method really well and still end up with outlier data.
Buy supplements in POWDER FORM when possible if you don't need enteric capsule, etc.
It eliminates other contaminant/padding, no capsule materials to worry about.
You can then also vary the dose size to see if there is a tipping point where it works.
For all we know the author was overweight and the mg of Theanine vs KG of weight was not enough for any effect.
And Theanine DEFINITELY "works for me". Not even a question of doubt.
I always take a 1/4 teaspoon before bed. If I forget on rare occasion I find myself wondering why I can't fall asleep until I remember.
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.
Great experiment! It’s important to highlight that even in rigorously blinded studies which find a drug ineffective on average, there can still be genuine responders—this is known scientifically as “heterogeneous treatment effects.” Essentially, individuals vary in genetics, metabolism, and neurochemistry, which can cause meaningful differences in drug responsiveness. Thus, an N=1 trial, like yours, might indeed reveal real personal benefits that wouldn’t appear in a population-level analysis.
However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.
I made an app for this called Reflect [1]. You can run self guided experiments for anything you can model as a metric in the app. I just wrote about an experiment I did with nootropic coffee [2].
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/reflectapp/p/my-experience-wit...
Love it - Great work. I’m gonna give it a go.
I like this idea! To build on it, the schedules could be non-random (systematic with random offset) and test combinations of substances in a way that maximises information both in the cases where substances are independent and when they have suspected interactions.
Hard to pull off! But I imagine the wave of Bryan Johnson fans would be game.
I appreciate the high agency and citizen science here. However, I think 1) theanine should not be isolated but ingested in context (via a nice pot of tea) 2) there should be a little bit more respect for statistical methods.
While those two points appear to be contradictory (the first appears to inject noise/variability, the second is intended to reduce noise), I believe they each produce a superior result. Regarding the first point (drinking tea instead of ingesting a capsule), theanine does not operate in isolation, but instead interacts significantly with other compounds. Regarding the second point, statistics are the lifeblood of these kinds of trials, what is the purpose of a series of trials without a correct analysis? (I believe it should be standard to devote a huge chunk of time to getting the math right during the analysis, even though it is hard/unintuitive.)
I have taken a lot at times, up to 1-2g per day in powder form. I mix it with my tea, which also has theanine.
However I can't say it really helped with anxiety. TFA says some people claim its more effective than xanax. Maybe it works like that for some people, but not for me - it doesn't even put a dent in my anxiety - which can be pretty bad (struggling to leave the house). I've never taken xanax either, although my doc once gave me 10 pills of lorezepam for acute anxiety situations. Those basically had no effect on me too.
Theanine does reduce caffeine jitters although I usually only have that problem with coffee. These days I take 200mg most days mostly out of habit.
After reading a few paragraphs about theanine and dopamine and all the other amino acids, anyone else get to
> Examine is an independent website that’s respected for summarizing the scientific literature on health and supplements
and read that website name as "exa-meen"?
I tried 200mg L-theanine pills for some days. I noticed a slightly calming effect, but after the supposed effect wore off, I suffered from unusually high level of anxiety. So I guess it can give you withdrawal symptoms. CBD worked much better for me in that regard.
I started taking 1 x 50mg CBD gummy in the morning about 2 months ago and I can confirm that it is better than L-theanine. My analysis-paralysis is gone. I am moving forward with my life better than I have in 15 years.
I was one of the commenters in the HN thread linked by the blog post, and I do find that L-theanine reduces my coffee jitters.
Did you find CBD helped consistently, or did you have to experiment with doses and timing to get the right balance?
I only used it occasionally, took it about 1 hours before going to sleep. I can't really comment on daily use or dosage. I just bought whatever CBD oil a local market was selling. It contains 10% broad spectrum CBD isolate (rest being hemp oil) if the label is to be believed. At least in my country these things aren't well regulated, so experiences will probably vary between vendors, as you can't be sure of exact CBD concentration.
That makes sense, especially with the lack of regulation
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
Wish more people would report their placebo experiments. I have periodically run them on myself, and am consistently surprised how I have been unable to differentiate substances I thought were helpful (adderall, kratom) end up indistinguishable from placebo over 20+ trials. I guess that my main takeaway was that it is hard to pinpoint when subtle drugs work. My second takeaway was that the data I generated would prob be useful to share, but with no examples anyone cared I opted against. This story inspires me to potentially revisit some of my past placebo tests and show my data.
Since no one has mentioned it yet, given the author felt like Japanese tea was providing a calming / anti-anxiety effect but with a much lower potential dose of Theanine....I wonder what would happen if he repeated the experiment with a sub-lingual dosing mechanism?
It seems like this would be closer to taking the tea in your mouth and savoring it over multiple sips across a few minutes, and could explain the smaller apparent dose having an effect (some of the Theanine goes straight into the bloodstream and bypasses the digestive tract).
As a person who drinks tea for 30+ year old in a country which is top 3 in world tea consumption, I can say that theanine works. The biggest advantage of it when compared to caffeine, it doesn't create that tension in the body. You just work and concentrate. While it's not as powerful as caffeine, it allows one to work very efficiently and for long hours, if they choose to do so.
Also, against the popular myth, black tea / theanine doesn't affect iron absorption that much (if any), if it was, the whole country would be anemic, and we are not.
I’m not sure, but seems like there should be a difference between someone conducting research while testing theanine versus someone just consuming theanine to battle anxiety. That’s probably been said in other comments in a more scientific way. But it also seems like consuming yummy hot tea that happen to have theanine would be another relevant method for comparison. Maybe placebo, theanine pill, and tea drink (or other naturally occurring food source)? It just seems like the tea or act of drinking tea and the time it takes might be relaxing??
Cool experiment!
Once the author started taking pills independently of their stress level, the variance of differences diminished a lot. I'd wager this supports the mean reversion hypothesis.
Also, while I agree with their general conclusion that theanine probably doesn't reduce stress, I'd give assign more probability to the hypothesis that theanine does work, but in other design settings. For example: drinking tea instead of taking pills, or measuring stress levels after a day instead of an hour, or evaluating the difference across time instead of in time chunks.
This is the first time I've seen a self-study with l-theanine in the context of stress relief. In fact, somehow, it's the first time I've ever seen stress relief mentioned on the topic. For me it has always been about providing a small cognitive boost. The result is clear: for this particular individual, and the specific goal of stress relief, l-theanine does not work.
My anecdote: I used l-theanine supplement for about a year straight. To me, the noticable effect was similar to that of a cup of coffee but with practically none of the jitters.
From a biology perspective base amino acids (such as theanine) on their own are not generally major modulators of human function. You want to experiment with small molecules, something that binds with proteins such as enzymes which in turn modulate pathways and cell functions.
Binders need a energy configuration and 3 dimensional structures that "fits" into such proteins, and individual amino acids dont really cut it. Also the amino acids get rapidly used for protein construction so they dont stick around long.
PhDs in the subject can please correct me I am wrong here.
I wish people can pay for trials on products. e.g. In subreddits for hairfall, people cite all sort of very badly done research that shows some chemical in expensive product as effective, for which the only research is sponsored by the company making it. If 1000 people in that subreddit pays $100, it might be enough for a good trial and knowing the active people there, they would likely pay even more. Same for multivitamins, the research on that is so important yet so bad and biased, and getting million dollar crowdfunding should be possible.
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.
A bit unrelated, but try having l theanine after a night of drinking: it makes you wake up fresh and without a hangover because it speeds up alcohol processing and it metabolites by the liver and also prevents alcoholic liver damage. Me and all my friends who tried it say “i wake up totally fresh after theanine”. There’s also a study confirming this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16141543/
> Many people try theanine and report wow or great for ADHD or cured my (social) anxiety or changing my life.
I'd never heard of that.
All my life I've drank enormous amounts of tea. To the point that I've had withdrawal symptoms from physical caffeine addiction. But I'm only recognizing more ADHD symptoms the more I read about it. (Not a controlled experiment; I'm aware of that.)
I am pretty relaxed, though.
I take L-theanine for ADHD
1. Theanine is an analog for Glutamate and Glutamine. 2. Due to indirect relationships to ADHD, Depression, etc. no one take Theanine by itself...I do not. 3. When drugs are created we often have incomplete pictures, for example SSSrIs for depression...we now know its both low levels in serotonin and GABA combined...bias yes I take Theanine, GABA and Glutamine for depression and it does work.
One experiment on oneself means very little...I know as I spent 36 months finding the combo that works for my depression and ADHD.
I've been conducting a self-experiment on the effects of various substances (all legal and easily accessible) on sleep for about four months, following a similar approach to the author. Using two different sleep trackers, I rely solely on absolute, measurable values, avoiding subjective impressions. It's fun but requires time and patience—sometimes I have to restart cycles from scratch. So far, I’ve gathered datasets for Phenibut, Theanine, Piracetam, and Baclofen. The experiment is still ongoing.
I love theanine as a low-level anxiolytic. My recommendation:
* Try a lower dosage first. 400mg made me irritable. 100mg works great for me.
* Effect seems to lessen if taken consecutive days; in fact it might have the opposite effect of making one more irritable than calmer.
A few nights ago I was tossing and turning because I had too much coffee before bed. A theanine pill and sleep was restored. It doesn't do much more than that, but it's good to have for one of those days that you just want to punch a wall.
(Maybe it’s because tea is better than coffee?)
Coffee contains several ingredients that act as opioid receptor antagonists, which can be unpleasant (as in "reverse the pleasant / calming effects of endogenic opioids"). Some people seem to be more affected than others, kinda like with the intensive gastrin release / coffee induced instapoop.
Amino Acid therapy requires an empty stomach, and the postulated effects usually require larger doses. But that would blow up his experiment design. Also there can be time of day widows for efficacy. Science has gotten far with lock and key receptor models. But some of this stuff can be sensitive to time and cofactors, beyond genetic and epigenetic individual variance.
Following in the trend of the guy who tried LSD microdosing and concluded with cocksure fanfare it does nothing.
Which throws a veil of doubt over these kind of studies. Something is open to be defective in structure or presentation.
"Daily intravenous heroin use - a placebo controlled self-administration study" "It does absolutely nothing"
Would we all jump to the occasion of believing it, if the writeup is polished enough?
I think the experiment is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption the time to metabolize medication is identical to time for the body to return to baseline.
Regular Vitamin-D supplements can taken once a week or daily and have the same long term effect.
And for a sample of N=1: The L-theanine side effects of one dose last several days. Taking it daily makes the side effects significantly worse.
I absolutely love how committed this author is to the science to the point where they managed to remain so objective.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams.
Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams.
That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.
It does that for me too, but usually that seems to result in worse sleep.
Sure it does.
Did you read the article?
I did.
The article makes no claims about dreams or the relationship between dreams and sleep quality.
What a waste of opportunity and time. All for nothing because author was too lazy to make blank capsules and used Vit D, which of course may have effect. You can buy capsules easily and have true blind test.
The point to the story is that he ran his own trial on his own body and found that there wasn't any benefit. Guys, it's just an opinion...
I don’t understand why they used another supplement hypothesized to mitigate stress as a control.
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.
Yeah surprised at all the comments saying this was a good experiment. Seems like a huge waste of time.
Yeah. Like yes vitamin d is slow acting, but still when you can pick literally any substance in the world...
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.
> This hacker news thread is full of positive reports,
Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical/biological things.
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
The whole site should have this as a tagline.
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.
https://www.drugrehab.com/addiction/alcohol/risks-of-mixing-...
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!
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/bayes-rule-odds-form
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.
Gell-Mann says: "yes, but just medicine"
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.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption
This is better conceived and more carefully controlled than the vast majority of the published research I see pouring out every week.
Or maybe the stress-reducing effect carries over to the next day?
Stress has a habit of not being randomly reset to the default value every morning when you wake up
sorry this experiment setup suffers from the photon dual slit experiment problems. How anxious am i really if i am observing my stress levels, noting down pre and post measurements? Placebo or not, this level of mindfulness is probably the biggest anxiety affecting factor so it invalidates the experiment.
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.
Can for myself just say I took the anime for a while but don't think it did anything. Way higher effect was switching to decaf and then drink mushroom coffee for alertness. There are different mixes out there, I just went with a random one from Amazon when I enjoyed some test-packages from chi-coffee. I'm also mixing with cocos cream and cows milk.
Got pretty powerful anxiety effect from it after taking it a while. Definitely not for me.
I like this work a lot.It seems like the sort of thing that if done by thousands of like minded people would build a knowlege base that cuts through the very very messy reality of life, and gets us closer to rules of thumb that might help. chinese medicine with techno characteristics? cyber herbal8sm :) we need an app for this
But... data eh?
the ONLY repository of data, is genes.vast, tested in deep time, with countless trilions of runs.now running on quintillions of test units. we have access to a tiny portion of the data, but are at the stage of? do you read the text from the right?left? top? bottom?, but of course its read as a gestalt, and so outside of our capacity.
What may be accessable, is our enzimatic relationships with the substances in our environment, and how those balances are specific to groups and individuals, but it wont be easy to unravel, records plus actual chemical testing of anything, anywhere, anytime which boils down to "light" sensors, that are capable of seeing and diferentiating the exicitation of molecules under ambiant conditions.
what is dismissed by so called science, are the indivuals who survive and thrive under exactly the same conditions that decimate there peers, and how "science" is perfectly happy to call something "luck" and then move towards monitising "bad luck" .....scientificly.....rather that work towards understanding the framework that governs everything
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.
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).
It's the contrary. Science, see European Food Safety Authority and examine.com, shows lots of data that it doesn't work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arent all humans different and therefore N=1 actually ok in this scenario??
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.
N is the way.
I am shocked, shocked that he published this without IRB approval. Where are the ethical standards?
Now Foods sponsored pill post
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
Placebo is a fantastic treatment for hypochondria.
Definitely cured my leprosy and phantom pregnancy. Hasn't reduced my PSA yet.
But have you got your fingers back?
What does gwern or guzey think of this? I only trust them
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.)
”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.
In spite of the confidence you're stating this with, it sounds like a serious over-simplification of a very complex dynamic.
Occam’s razor. These compounds do exactly what I’ve described, which directly increases feelings of anxiety.
Occam's razor helps identify which hypothesis to test first, it doesn't state some truth.
Yes. And it recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
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.
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.
If by short you mean multiple weeks?
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.
Where do you get multiple weeks? From what I can find, harman and norharman both have elimination half-lives shorter than half an hour.
If it was weeks, they would accumulate to very toxic levels in anyone who smokes or has a few cups of coffee a day.
That’s in blood. Both are fat soluble and will get stored in brain fatty tissue where the half-life is multiple weeks.
Your second point is spot on.
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.
Or maybe it doesn't actually make him less nervous, in which case the beta-carbolines are irrelevant.
Of course. MAO A/B producing gene variants (including high- and low-activity VNTRs and even complete deletion) are some of the most varied in humans.
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.
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.
Hey, ok I get it for coumarin but just out of curiosity, what can introduce heavy metals in this mix?
Some people add yellow lead salts to turmeric to increase profit margins.
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.
Turmeric, but I think it's only some suppliers?
And that’s making the huge assumption that what you had what it claims to.
Appreciate the response. I took the turmeric combo a couple of times and had to stop due to stomach irritation from the pepper. Can’t edit my comment.
Were any of the downvotes and responses related to the Theanine with relora pill for stress relief?
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.