> 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.

Try oolong.

Making a cup as we speak :)

Cheers!

Who downvotes oolong? Lol

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

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.

tl;dr Possibly

Extremely speculative and based on nothing but pure, unadulterated dubious armchair/reddit science, but: L-theanine is a (mild) depressant/anxiolytic with reported effects not wholly unlike GABAergic substances' (benzodiazepines, pregabalin, gabapentin, phenibut, alcohol) reported effects. GABAergics modulate or increase GABA-related activity. (GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter.) L-theanine is structurally similar to glutamate (the primary excitatory neurotransmitter) and interacts with glutamate receptors in a way that inhibits their normal activity. Increasing GABA-related activity and reducing glutamate-related activity can potentially have similar "mellowing" brain effects, like the equivalency of pushing a "slow-down" button with more force and pushing a "speed-up" button with less force.

For some reason, GABAergics make some people more prone to irritability, and, in some cases, can reduce the threshold for anger and rage. Despite not being a GABAergic, I could see L-theanine potentially causing a similar effect in some people.

(To anyone with neuroscience knowledge, please feel free to address errors/leaps here.)

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.

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)

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

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.

I have been maca and L-theanine jacking with the effect the focus lasts longer than with caffeine. My bias is that I have ADHD and now use a MAO inhibitor nootropics approach combined with Maca

Maca gets me so wired that I feel high. Even tiny amounts

Don’t know if there is much evidence, but I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.

Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.

>I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.

Why didn't the caffeinated beverages stimulate the advancement of science in the countries where those plants are native from?

It possible did. I think coffee was created in Arabia in the 900s. Wasn’t the Arabic countries way ahead of Europe in terms of technology for those several hundred years?

Not in that way. Arabic expansion grew a new layer above cultural heritage of East Mediterranian region, and Persia, and its most important centers were exactly there, showing a lot of continuity with their "pre-coffee" roots. Which I think contradicts your theory.

Perhaps it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

Coffee really became common beverage in Islamic world about 3 centuries after the "golden age" finished

If that was the case, then the enlightenment would have occurred in north africa first, then the middle east and then eastern europe. Western europe was centuries late to coffee consumption. Also, how do you explain the renaissance?

The enlightenment happened for the same reason that the renaissance happened. Exploration and introduction to new lands, knowledge, goods, wealth, etc. The renaissance was the result of western europe's direct connection to east ( china, india, etc ) via the mongol empire in the 1200s. The enlightenment is the result of western europe's direct connection to the americas via columbus in the late 1400s. It's not an accident that most scholars use 1500 as the boundary between the renaissance and the enlightenment.

Isn't this exactly what happened? My understanding of history is that up until like the 16th century North Africa, the Middle East, and India were global leaders in science and industry.

> Isn't this exactly what happened?

No.

> My understanding of history is that up until like the 16th century North Africa, the Middle East, and India were global leaders in science and industry.

If anyone were 'global leaders' back then it was probably india and china but both were predominantly tea drinking societies. But there were no real global leaders of 'science and industry' back then because 'science and industry' didn't exist as we define it today and nobody had global influence. North africa hadn't been a leader of anything since the fall of ancient egypt. The middle east had it's moments of glory but far more moments of embarrassment ( european, mongol, turkish, etc conquest ).

Arguing coffee was behind the enlightenment is as silly as arguing tea is why britain conquered the world.

Okay, thanks for explaining!

> North africa hadn't been a leader of anything since the fall of ancient egypt.

Not true; see Carthage. They dominated trade and seafaring, and were even the first to sail around Africa (as opposed to the Portuguese, 2,000 years later). Ancient Egypt was in its heydey 2,000 years before Carthage.

Some podcast I was listening to made an interesting argument along these lines around tea, although more in the context of the industrial revolution. Their point was that tea, a stimulant, was absolutely central in motivating workers to get up at the crack of dawn and work long hours doing precise, grueling work. So much so that it became a strategic necessity for the English economy, leading to much of their colonial policy in China and India. Not sure exactly how "valid" this reading is, but it's definitely interesting to think about coffee and tea as actual stimulant drugs with economic consequences. Certainly today tea has a very benign reputation

Plentiful, low cost sugar also might have been a contributing factor, being a quick source of calories and energy, combined with the caffeine.

If your daily diet was previously primarily vegetables with some meat and in season fruits, and then suddenly you're having sugar with every meal, you would probably have more energy to work harder with the extra focus the caffeine provides.

You left out grains, which were the majority of Europe's diet for the majority of the written history of Europe. The sugar hypothesis doesn't make such sense in light of (cheaper, more plentiful, and calorie-dense) grains.

We really are what we eat.

Michael Pollan wrote about it:

https://michaelpollan.com/books/caffeine-how-coffee-and-tea-....

It's guaranteed to be false for the simple fact of human organism adaptability to caffeine. You certainly feel increased alertness after a cup of coffee, so subjectively it may feel very empowering. But if you're a long-time caffeine consumer your baseline (no caffeine alertness) goes down, and in the long run coffee just brings you up to the same level non-consumers have for free. So let's not fool ourselves, coffee is primaryly for pleasure, it doesn't make any miracles for productivity

> But if you're a long-time caffeine consumer your baseline (no caffeine alertness) goes down, and in the long run coffee just brings you up to the same level non-consumers have for free

Citation? It sounds a lot like that's something that you find convenient to believe, perhaps because you gave up coffee and you want to tell yourself you did something good for yourself.

Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.

There was just a study published which proposed to show amphetamines of all kinds, actually decreased productivity, and significantly delayed time-to-resolution of cognitive problem solving tests...it also did show the people on the amphetamines vastly overestimate their productivity "boost" from the drugs. Obviously, devil's in the details.

Yes, please: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23108937/

>Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.

For sure it is (for the reasons I described above). As for pleasure: I don't know, maybe you are the one who hates its smell, and taste, and just takes it as a medecine. It's not impossible, but it would make you an outlier.

Btw, I do consume caffeine, nicotine, and sometimes alcohol. I'm just conscious nothing of those gives me a superpower. Even though they can give a subjective feeling of superpower sometimes.

To me it seems like it's more about control: Before coffee you are tired and sleep well, then "flip a switch" (drink coffee) and you are alert and ready for the day. And you can do this even if perhaps you didn't sleep well, or not enough, or you just take a while to wake up, because otherwise you are not productive for a while.

Yes, the baseline is unchanged - but it's controlled and on demand.