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Simon Alger's avatar

I really just want to thank you for these theanine self-experiments. I took the stuff for years (stacked with caffeine from coffee) and I really wanted to believe it was the nootropic powerhouse it's been claimed to be, but I could never notice any difference from the combo vs coffee alone. Really pleased that (i) other people have the same doubts, and (ii) you set out to measure this and most importantly share the results.

I identified two caveats to your experiment I'd like to mention:

1. As some others here have mentioned, it could be that it has anxiolytic effects for some individuals but not others.

2. The more important point I think: maybe our ability to rate our level of perceived anxiety at any one moment is not reliable, or at least the variance in our ability to do so is larger than the effect size of theanine. This may sound odd as you might say anxiety is itself a perception so it's only our felt experience of it that matters, therefore what you rate it as *is* what it is. But I would argue that this needn't be the case. Additionally, theanine could reduce the range of physiological symptoms of anxiety (not only emotional/psychological symptoms), like increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, etc. To this end it would be interesting if someone would do a similar experiment but measure physiological metrics in addition to perceived anxiety.

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