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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

> coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).

I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.

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Green tea contains rather quite a lot of caffeine itself, depending on the kind. At the one end of the spectrum, a cup of Gyokuro is more or less equivalent to three expressos. At the other extremity green teas made of twigs rather than leaves have very little caffeine.

I've been overwhelmed by Gyokuro before...

Only if you measure cup (200 or so ml) of Gyukuro to an expresso (30 ml). Per 'weight' it has much less then coffee. (same measurements: 100 ml of expresso is about 210 mg of caffeine and 100ml of gyukuro is about 70mg of caffeine)

Any tea does, just to varying degrees, and it definitely works. This is due to a chemical called L-theanine. I never have caffeine without theanine now. Usually I just drink a green tea alongside whatever other caffeine I have (or only drink tea). You can buy it separately but I don't see the point.

If you’re lazy like me, you can buy Loud Brew, which is cold brew coffee with L-Theanine.

    L-theanine

Yeah! I've personally experimented (n=1) quite thoroughly with it. It truly reduces or eliminates caffeine jitters.

This product is excellent for energy on the go. Caffeine and l-theanine in a single pill. I keep a few in my bag. I don't know if there's anything special about this particular product. There are other ones that may be better/cheaper. But I've gone through a few bottles of it in the past years and am pleased: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MQWJYJ3

    You can buy it separately but I don't see the point.

Well, clearly a lot of people like coffee and probably don't want to have a side of green tea with their coffee, so... you can see the point, right? =)

I do buy it separately. It's dirt cheap. I stir it into my coffee. Reduces caffeine jitter.

That all said, editorial time: caffeine is not awesome. It is a psychoactive substance (duh) and eventually it goes from "fun boost" to "I need this to feel normal." At least for me. I do have some every day but my goal is always to drink the smallest reasonable amount for me in order to manage my energy. Respect to people who drink 0mg.

Was your experimentation more casual or rigorous? People take supplements but rarely take the time to even casually log perceived effects or use a self-blinded A/B study (my own lazy ass included). If you took a more rigorous approach I'm curious about your methods.

Out of curiosity, how do you self-blind? Do you have a friend make your coffee for you, with/without the additive?

Well, you could make both types in identical cups, put labels on the bottom of the cups, shuffle the cups, drink one, record your observations and take the label from the cup you drank and stick it to your notes.

Assuming it's not detectable via taste I would find a way to pre-make and randomize test/control doses of the additive, and add the assigned vial for that day to my morning coffee.

Biggest issue I think would be making sure that there aren't any tells like flavor or some quality of the additive.

There's no taste or smell.

Brew identical looking bottles of cold brew. Label the bottoms 1 through whatever. Mix them up. Label the lids A through whatever. Probably need to add some creamer to mask any possible sediment. Drink from them throughout the week. Note the lid label and your reaction. At the end of the test period look at the bottoms of the bottles to correlate the controls and placebos with your experiences.

I personally don't feel the need with this particular thing though. It's a fairly pronounced difference.

It's also not really susceptible to the placebo effect IMO. Could I imagine some vague promised positive effect? Absolutely yes. Could I imagine the erasure of jitters? I don't think I could placebo that away.

Anyway as linked in another post this is well-studied.

Totally subjective, completely non-rigorous.

That said:

- I'm middle aged and have had tens of thousands of cups of coffee

- The difference is pronounced, not subtle

- It's well-studied https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18296328/

FWIW, I've played around with a lot of supplements. Generally the effects are non-existent or subtle. I'm not generally given to a placebo effect wrt this kind of stuff

Good to know. I may give it a shot myself.

Good luck! It's safe enough and cheap enough, for sure.

> Respect to people who drink 0mg.

But caffeine and even coffee specifically seem to have positive health effects. If people are happy with 0mg they should continue that, but if people are happy with low doses of caffeine they should also continue that.

Personally I love coffee, but I limit myself to one cup a day and drink yaupon when I want more caffeine. This results in less sweating, nausea, anxiety. Supposedly yaupon should help with stress relief as well, but I doubt it's a strong enough effect to overcome learning that a new ticket is due in 5 hours.

Is it the caffeine itself or tannins and other substances that have the health benefits?

Oolong is the tea variety with higher L-theanine. In Fugi, where that tea is from they rebrew their tea 4-5 times and they feel 3 & 4 are the best ones as they have more relative Theanine. I've been drinking Yerba Mate stacked w Oolong for 15 years now. Key to tea is careful brewing w attention to temp and duration. One last warning many modern tea bags are plastic, avoid those.

Interesting, I might try oolong! Might save me drinking multiple cups and running to pee so often.

I've heard this too, but green tea, for whatever reason, absolutely ratchets up anxiety for me. Black coffee can if I have too much, but is surprisingly less likely to

Same here. I got into loose leaf tea to cut down on coffee drinking. I tried all sorts of greens but had to stop drinking it because it made me some combination of anxious and easy to anger.

Yes! I also get irritable, just forgot until you mentioned it. I wonder if it's the theanine.

I experience the same effect and have heard others say the same thing. L-theanine activates excitatory neurons and also increases dopamine levels in the brain.

Yes it does, although not optimally. the L-Theanine is what offsets the caffeine, but it works best in a 2:1 concentration (L-Theanine:Caffeine). In Green tea, it's more like 1:6.

l-theanine, it's amazing - I'm drawing when I drink coffee, so I started an experiment and drew the same cat a few times, much much softer with L-Theanine in the coffee. But the coffee tastes like old feed with the L-Theanine in there xD

The calming effect comes from L Theanine which you can buy separately and add to your coffee

Try oolong.

Making a cup as we speak :)

Cheers!

Who downvotes oolong? Lol

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