My 16-month theanine self-experiment

>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.

> 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.

Caffeine sensitivity varies widely, as does sensitivity to most substances.

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?

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.