Really and Truly Reduces Norepinephrine Levels!
"... which is a claim made by other manufacturers. It doesn't boost serotonin or dopamine, but that's actually good. I studied neurochemistry as a Harvard grad student, a subject I got into because my own brain was behaving like a wild experiment in same (due to a sleep disorder). This is as informed a review as you can read.
So, stress and anxiety have two components. There's the bad feeling that you get when you think about the stressful thing, and there's the continual thinking about the thing itself. There's not much you can do about the former that's not worse than the stress itself (drink and drugs). So we want a way to get our minds off the thing that is stressing us out and/or making us anxious.
The next question is, is this a legitimate stressful thing? Or are you being overly anxious about things that other people deal with better? Boosting serotonin treats the latter, by helping the feeling part of the brain accept the message from the thinking part of the brain that "nothing bad is likely to happen." That's why it's an effective treatment for general anxiety disorder, OCD, and the like. But it does jack-all to keep your mind off of an actual stressful situation.
To do that, you want to reduce the level of the brain chemical that focuses your attention, that keeps your attention on whatever you're currently thinking about so that your mind doesn't wander. Ordinarily you want plenty of that chemical. As you might guess, when it's low, you get ADD symptoms, and boosting the chemical will treat the distractibility of ADHD. That chemical is norepinephrine (NE). (I actually figured all this out in 1998, several years before Eli Lilly stumbled on the role of NE in attention by developing Strattera).
When we are in a stressful situation the brain boosts NE. That's a good idea if the stressful situation is fleeing from a bear, and your mind wandering off to some other topic will get you eaten. However, we did not evolve to deal with stressful situations that might go on day and night, like losing your job and not being able to pay your bills. In that situation, you want ordinary NE levels, so you can get your mind off the situation (and thereby reduce the stress), and only deal with it when *you* want to. You want to reduce your NE levels. And that's what this amino acid does. Really and truly.
Now, how do I know that? Here's a short version of the story. All my life I've been able to do a certain type of genuine multi-tasking, namely, being deep in thought while executing tasks like making myself dinner (I’m always deep in thought). To do this, you have to continually switch your attention from the deep thoughts to the task at hand and then back, or else you won't remember what you've done. It's not something you do consciously--it just happens.
Well, over the past months I lost this ability to a disturbing degree. Example: taking the milk out and putting it on the counter, then going back to the fridge and looking for the milk (with increasing frustration). Or deciding to wash my hands to take out my contacts, then finding myself sitting at my desk remembering that I had intended to do that, a few minutes ago, but having no memory at all of having done it or not. I could remember the train of deep thought, but did I do it all sitting here, or was half of it at the bathroom sink? No idea.
It was clear to me that excessively high NE was preventing my brain from doing the quick unconscious attentional switches that would allow me to remember what I was doing while I'd been thinking. (Another indicator was my decreasing ability to handle hot salsa. I told you this was the short version!) Finally, I stopped executing habits; it was when I tried, for the first time in my life, to get out of the car without having unbuckled my seat belt that I finally decided to search for a natural OTC substance that might reduce NE.
It worked overnight. Dramatically. And there was unexpected evidence beyond a 90% restoration of my ability to multi-task. I use Office a lot, where Ctrl-B and Ctrl-I do bold and italics, but I use another app where they do different, unfortunate things, and as hard as I could try I’d been unable to avoid using them, over and over again. Since Theanine I've been catching myself 9 times out of 10 -- the brain just goes there now on its own.
But wait, there's even more. I've been on a beta (NE)-blocker for a benign but very uncomfortable irregular heartbeat for about five years. I've gotten the daily dose down from 75 mg to 50, but when I tried 25 I had some very mild symptoms the next day, under random circumstances, so I went back to 50. When my prescription ran out while I was on Theanine I decided not to refill it. Sure enough, in 10 days I've had very mild symptoms just twice, both times when I was most stressed out (driving and being late to my destination). It's not something I would have much noticed if it weren't for my history, so it's clear to me that the Theanine is handling that problem as well.
I started out with 100 mg at day and upped it to 200 mg when my brain seemed to be adjusting to its presence a bit; that hasn't happened at the higher dose. I’ve also done 100 and then 200 at night. This hasn’t helped me sleep better that I can tell, but my breathing (as measured by my CPAP machine), which was always excessively deep, is more normal with it. I'll update this review if I get a better handle on that."
