The only thing that worked was microdosing shrooms which I've done twice in SF. I felt very calm and had a lot of novel ideas during these two days. Would recommend trying. Never microdosed LSD.
Does anyone else have this issue with shrooms? FWIW I believe I'm generally quite resistant to psychoactive substances having been treated with benzos for anxiety and depression and finding they did almost nothing to allieviate any symptoms. The curious thing was that despite being warned against their "incredible addictiveness" I was able to increase my dosage way beyond prescribed levels only to find out they still did nothing and then quit them cold turkey with no effect whatsoever. It was almost like swallowing sugar pills.
I've tried a lot of CBD products and some work VERY well (Feals, Soul) and some might as well be gummy bears (Cornbread Hemp). I generally disbelieve "internet" PR claims as well, but the two I mentioned are legit.
I'll eat 3 Feals gummies or 1 Soul "Out of Office" quad, and it rocks me. (M, 40's, 6', 170lbs).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.