Theanine Self-Experiment
My 16-month theanine self-experiment:
Still, I’ve supplemented theanine on and off for more than 10 years, and it seems helpful. So after seeing the weak scientific evidence, I thought: Why not do a self-experiment?
It’s hard to disprove the idea that theanine works. But I tell you this: I expected it to work. And I really tried. For almost 100 trials over 16 months, I paid attention to what I was feeling and tried to detect any sign that I’d taken theanine, even if it wasn’t a change in stress. I could detect nothing. Even after months of failure, I’d often feel confident that this time I could tell, only to be proven wrong.
I’ve seen many other self-experiments (including for theanine), but they’re non-blinded and I’d be doing you a disservice if I linked to them. People often mention that hypothetically this means the results aren’t scientific, but treat it like a small niggling technicality. It’s not.
So I propose a new rule: Blind trial or GTFO.
A blinded self-experiment, well worth reading. I want to do this for modafinil - I always feel like I can get at least 50% of the boost from a placebo.