Seems like a nice way to have some weird dreams while probably improving my health (high dose B vitamins seem to do great things for mental disorder and the only apparent downside is colorful piss and possibly turning into a cherry).
For people who don't do vita-drugs, there's always tea, coffee, chocolate, and matcha.
Source: https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/02/19/cleveland-cl...
Coffee gives me the anxious jitters. L-theanine turns that into focused alertness. I have reduced my coffee intake overall and supplemented my caffeine intake with a small glass of energy drink each day (not a whole can).
My daily supplements intake includes L-theanine (the brand depicted by the video thumbnail in the linked post), St Johns Wort and an IBS support supplement (NutraLife Gut Relief) that contains 2000mg of glutamine per dose.
All of that really helps with anxiety and depression. If I want extra energy, throw in some L-carnitine.
So, I would say that it definitely has an impact. Perhaps it would have worked better with a smaller dose.
https://www.sysrevpharm.org/articles/adverse-effects-of-gree...
I just realized this week I haven't been biting my nails and from this popping up thought about it, went and checked, and the new magnesium drops I started taking have theanine.
Curious to try this out now -- have never tested L-tyrosine before. I wonder what other effects it could have.
"The findings of this systematic literature review indicate that the devices with higher relative agreement and sensitivities to multistate sleep (ie, Fitbit Charge 4 and WHOOP) seem appropriate for deriving suitable estimates of sleep parameters. However, analyses regarding the multistate categorization of sleep indicate that all devices can benefit from further improvement in the assessment of specific sleep stages."
Saved you a click.
And if you do find an effect, then you should do a more high-effort self-blinded test.
The writing in that first paper is so poor that it's hard to take it too seriously, but it's a narrative review, not a study. The second link is a study on a few rats.
For example, in one study "the final dose of 1 gram of Matcha green tea was taken on the testing day and contained only 12.4 mg of L- theanine." Source: https://www.ffhdj.com/index.php/DietarySupplementsNutraceuti...
Another study: "According to Kaneko et al., the content of l-theanine in matcha tea infusions amounts to 6.1 mg/L [50], while Unno et al. [9] found as much as 44.65 mg/g of that compound in matcha tea samples." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7796401/
I'm not sure, but I guess one would use around 4 grams of matcha in a cup? So then at the upper bound you would come close to 200mg. But matcha has a lot of caffeine so probably not suitable to improve sleep.