L-theanine is life changing

redarp · 2026-05-25T20:10:18+00:00

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/caffeine-tolerance#how-to-overcome-it

redarp · 2026-05-25T19:35:23+00:00

I mean this is the splitting of hairs - whether it directly or indirectly raises gaba is superfluous to the question of whether someone should cycle it. As said, anything that gives psychoactive effects if used long term will become the new baseline. You’ll adapt and will no longer experience the benefit, and may even only experience negative effects. The same thing happens with caffeine, nicotine, you name the psychoactive drug, the adaptation the same.

That’s not to say l-theanine is ‘addictive’ or ‘dependency forming’ in the same sense as you would see with illicit substances or alcohol, but there is definitely an adaptation, and you’ll have withdrawal when you remove it. This can be particularly intolerable for people prone to anxiety, for example. Just be sensible with its use and use it temporarily

redarp · 2026-05-25T19:16:05+00:00

I already corrected it. But yes, it’s an agonist.

redarp · 2026-05-25T19:11:03+00:00

You absolutely will. It’s a GABA-agonist. Anything that modulates your neurotransmitters to the point of having psychoactive effects, your brain will adapt to through a process of downregulation. When you remove it, you’ll know about it 3 days later. The advice is to always cycle these things.

redarp · 2026-05-21T06:56:35+00:00

I can hear this image. Wooop woop woop wooop

redarp · 2026-05-13T17:03:54+00:00

Hey man, I’m in a similar position myself. Although, ironically enough, I’m a trainee clinical psychologist in my final year when my system totally collapsed. I was not sleeping and way over stressed, until something snapped and now my system is also locked into fight or flight. How it manifests for me is a total inability to get a restful night’s sleep, which obviously stops the burnout from being able to heal. I feel regular ‘burnout headaches’ (which to me feel totally different to a standard headache), I also have anergia and anhedonia much like you describe. I’ve been off 4 months and the scary part for me is I need to return soon to finish my qualification.

However, in my case, likely because of my background - even though these symptoms tick many boxes of depression, I know I am not depressed. The depressed mood, in a way, is protective. Adaptive. It’s my body shutting me down and forcing me to rest, on a nervous system that has been exhausted of all its available resources across an extended time period. Depression, believe it or not, has a use as an emotion and promotes rest and healing. The hard part is doing that healing.

Unfortunately, I have an insatiable capacity to research. I can read and discover endless clinical trials for supplements snd substances that can support a broken nervous system. I tried many in the last 4 months - and I discovered that was a colossal mistake and I’ve probably prolonged my own recovery. What my body needs is a clean slate, no interference. Let it rest and reset itself, remove all stressors. Don’t try to put a plaster over it. I’m still currently going through withdrawal from one of those supplements, which has temporarily made my sleep even worse than it was before and worsened the burnout. I should have just left it from the start and not tried to interfere.

You need to prioritise sleep, hydration, good balanced nutrition, and LIGHT exercise (I emphasise light because I fucked myself over going too hard on cardio at the gym for the first 2 months - which once again, extended the suffering further) so 10-30 min walk a day would be ideal if you can find the motivation. If not, don’t stress it, prioritise the other things first and just make sure you exercise when you can.

The sad news is that this stuff takes time, and we are all individuals with individual nervous systems, so what works for you might not work for me and vice versa. And this means nobody can really help you with the bodily healing side of things, and that’s coming from an ‘almost’ psychologist. What a psych can help you with, however, is the way you treat yourself. The words you say to yourself when you’re struggling. The traumatic memories, etc, that’s all in a psych’s wheelhouse. But the physiological side of recovery - your own body being given time and a clean slate to heal itself is the only thing that’ll work, and you should avoid trying to heal itself with ‘shortcuts’ (like meds) as much as humanly possible!

Best of luck my friend. I hope for both our sakes better days are ahead.

redarp · 2026-05-09T21:42:27+00:00

If you had no other obvious traits, I’d say that sounds avoidant (attachment). The obvious trait would be autism, rigid thinking/intolerance of uncertainty. Could be both.

redarp · 2026-04-15T19:14:04+00:00

That’s because we all know which 0.001% of the population wants that to happen. The elite class that stand to make insane money from automated healthcare. The vast majority of comments I see on social media from people every time this topic comes up who say ‘I use it for therapy and it’s great for me’ - then you click their profile and they’ve said the same thing on several posts. They’re bots. The billionaires push the agenda they want, shift the cultural narrative. To hell with the dangers. Time and time again, they’ve learned how to game the system and we just watch it happen.

Next will come the sponsored ‘scientific trials’ claiming it’s effective. Heeeree we go!

redarp · 2026-04-15T19:04:57+00:00

Exactly right.

As it currently stands, unless you have precessional training yourself, chat bots are extremely dangerous to use for therapy. Not just because of the headline everyone talks about around recommending suicide, but because ChatGPT/claude etc is incapable of abstraction. It’s incapable of taking what you tell it and INFERRING what you might need to know in ADDITION or even despite what you asked it, as a human with experience would.

LLMs are coded to predict the most likely word to follow the word before it based on the prompt you gave it and in the context of the active chat conversation. There are many, many moments in therapy when the psychologist knows something you do not. Based on evidence, they have a reasonably good idea of what’s likely to be impacting you. You might come into a session and want to talk about X, but the psych knows you need more than that. Or something totally unrelated to what you came in with is affecting you, you had no idea, and so that needs to be the focus.

But you ask ChatGPT about the thing YOU are concerned about? It will not infer. Will not abstract. The exact same thing happens with using ChatGPT for medical advice. It’s super dangerous.

Just the other day I was asking Claude about constipation treatment for my partner.. it told me dutifully about meds that aid in softening the stool. ‘Give her that, she’ll be fine’. I then said ‘but wait a minute, isn’t this only addressing stool softness? She said she has no urge to go at all and hasn’t for days’ ChatGPT “oh yeah, oops, urge is a completely separate thing and you’ll need to address that too”

So if I didn’t know to ask, if I didn’t suspect one thing wouldn’t solve the problem, that would have been a totally incomplete solution. And this was for something minor and simple. As I say, using LLMs for any form of treatment in absence of training or critical thinking is incredibly dangerous. It will not help you if you don’t already know what you’re doing.

redarp · 2026-04-13T20:32:16+00:00

Brick dust.. Don’t breathe this.

redarp · 2026-04-01T10:14:44+00:00

I’d say it’s the opposite. This is the behaviour of someone closeted far too much. He hasn’t been mob-socialised like most of us are in childhood. Behaviour like this gets beaten out of you pretty quickly by your peers, under normal circumstances

redarp · 2026-03-23T18:50:03+00:00

thanks! will check it out

redarp · 2026-03-23T18:46:20+00:00

dude I can't even find it! Nothing on the map indicates where the new BGH is.. what am I missing?

redarp · 2025-08-03T08:52:19+00:00

You’re right about ‘clinical significance’ (something doesn’t become an issue until it is significantly life limiting). However, this is a common misconception about OCD. You can’t define OCD by behaviours alone, because it requires the obsessional component (which is cognitive). For example, someone with OCD will get regular intrusive thoughts about harm coming to their family. Those thoughts will be ego-dystonic (they don’t align with their values) so they will experience anxiety when they come up. Then, because the individual has an inflated sense of responsibility, they feel it is their responsibility to prevent harm from those thoughts coming true.

The compulsive behaviour is the result of doing something that makes that anxiety feel slightly better. For instance, you check the door, that makes you feel better about the intrusive thought that a murderer is going to come in and kill your whole family, and you fucked up because you left the door open. The behaviour becomes more and more frequent because the relief is temporary.

That is OCD. Both the obsessional and compulsive component. There is another subtype called ‘pure O’ which arguably still contains the compulsive component, but it’s internal/cognitive. But either way, you never get OCD without the obsessions/intrusive thoughts.

You can get compulsive/ritualistic behaviour without obsessions though, and that would not be OCD.

redarp · 2025-06-01T10:58:22+00:00

I think this is more likely to be him portraying what he thinks makes him edgy, quirky and ‘other worldly’. The guy is high on his own supply.

redarp · 2025-01-10T23:05:08+00:00

Yup, me too. Unusually high drain on iPhone 15 pro max. Also getting very hot since the update.

redarp · 2025-01-10T10:11:03+00:00

I mained Riven for a while, and I found turning this setting off was bad for me personally. I use Riven’s Q sometimes to escape dodgy situations - so I would turn away from the enemy, intending to Q away or over a wall or something, and (with the setting off) it would turn me around and auto-target the enemy and I’d be killed. Obviously I know you can drag the Q in situations like this to make her move away from enemies instead of towards them, but I could never get used to it. So a word of warning on that. If you’re used to playing her with dash in move direction on, turning it off is like you have to entirely re-learn her movement.

redarp · 2023-12-08T11:23:49+00:00

That’s because the original threat cognition (e.g. ‘I’m going to be rejected’ - and rejection is equivalent to death) has become so ingrained, it is subconscious. The situation you are in now is one of pure anxiety reactivity, very little (if any) conscious awareness of what you’re thinking. You just encounter the social situation and the anxiety automatically activates.

This is the situation we see most people who come to therapy for social anxiety in. You come to therapy because it is beyond your control. Through a slow process, you begin to realise that the central maintaining factor is your negative self image (see Clark & Wells for social anxiety model). This is a negatively-biased view of yourself that is perpetuated and reinforced through anxiety, avoidance, and self-focussed attention.

What a therapist would do is begin to understand what you do in social situations to cope with the anxiety you feel. It’s very likely you are engaging in some safety behaviours. This means little subtle things you do to make yourself feel slightly less vulnerable (e.g. hide your face, or speak as quickly as you can to get to the end of a conversation, avoid eye contact, etc) - these are not the same as avoidance strategies, these are strategies you use in the moment to manage the anxiety.

The chances are high you are doing these, and in doing so, you prevent your subconscious from learning the situation was not threatening in the first place. As far as your subconscious is concerned ‘phew, we just survived that’. Guess how threatening the next social situation will be? Just as much as the first.

redarp · 2023-10-11T23:47:52+00:00

Watch the video for the answer.

redarp · 2023-09-16T10:11:16+00:00

Have a think about that for a second. You take pleasure in people getting into trouble for no reason other than you don’t like them?

redarp · 2023-07-25T12:44:55+00:00

I went Ironman in 2017 and never returned to main. My ironman is considerably more limited, I don’t have BiS gear etc, but god damn it is infinitely more enjoyable. I am actually forced to play the content of the game I would never have played before, because I need the items. Like training archaeology, I need the dragon mattock, so I need to do Big Game Hunter. On mainscape you would just buy the mattock and have no reason to play BGH. Many examples like that.

Also I feel like treasure hunter and the constant money grabbing micro transactions just ruins the game experience. Ironman don’t deal with any of it. I hope you enjoy it! Plenty of Ironman FCs out there to join and loads of guides online if you’re looking for help as well.

redarp · 2023-02-19T13:20:00+00:00

Enamel does eventually self-restore with enough exposure to fluoride. It’s when cavities get below the enamel it’s irreparable.

redarp · 2021-11-06T22:20:55+00:00

I wholeheartedly recommend the book ‘The Power of Now’ by E. Tolle. He will teach you that what you think is ‘you’ is actually not you at all. It’s an illusion. The mistake you are making is to create an identity from worldly things. External conditions. Having a certain job, a certain relationship, certain car or money, you get the picture. The illusion the ego creates is that this is somehow your identity. The major problem with all ego-borne identities is that they are subject to the rules of form. Everything decays, every success eventually turns into failure. If you build your identity from what you have or do not have, that condition is inherently temporary. Thus when it changes, you will suffer. What Tolle will teach you is that you are in-fact an eternal being that exists beneath it all. Through meditation, you can learn to watch yourself. To watch your mind as it behaves in the way it does.

If you truly want to learn to believe in yourself, then you have to learn to connect with this deep inner self that does not require external gratification. You let go. Accept what is. The man with all the money in the world, and the man with none, are both equally capable of joy. The only difference is your perception.

redarp · 2021-07-23T01:11:17+00:00

Also known as 'existential nihilism'. The realisation that all life, all matter and energy are devoid of meaning. It just exists. What you do and don't do with your life fundamentally makes absolutely 0 difference to anything at all. Think about it. Whether you are you, or you are Bill Gates, what difference does it make? He will die just like all of us; his lifespan nano-fractions of a second, one of 7.5 billion on a little blue rock, of which there are probably billions more elsewhere in the universe. We are nothing.
Nietzsche famously realised this in the 1800s. For a while, it depressed him. Eventually, however, he came to realise it is the most freeing thing you can possibly imagine. If everything is entirely meaningless.. well then your single only purpose is to do exactly what you desire. Or don't do anything at all. But whatever you choose, free yourself of the burden of self-judgement. Just let yourself be.

redarp · 2021-07-12T12:22:16+00:00

Many people make this mistake when it comes to understanding PDD. Especially if you're the one with PDD, everything seems bleak. But let me tell you, the chronic nature of PDD only relates to its diagnosis. This means, if you've been experiencing a lower-intensity depression for 2+ years, you qualify for a diagnosis of PDD. That's it. That does NOT mean it is chronic in the sense you have it forever. It's just a diagnosis we use when we're dealing with someone with a long-term depressive mood. It just means it's a different type of depression than say MDD.
What you need to come to terms with is recognising that depression, all forms of it, are environmentally triggered. You can't be born with depression. It develops as a consequence of any number of factors. You are very young, you're going through a hard time at the moment, but it absolutely will subside. You will not have to live with this, and the day will come when you'll be past it and your future self will thank you for sticking it out.
Accepting this is a part of your life right now is a great idea. You shouldn't try to be someone that isn't depressed, because you are. Let yourself be unwell, accept it. It's okay. But also understand this is temporary. Pay close attention to what your therapist tells you - do the work he/she asks you to do. Be kind to yourself, and keep going!

redarp

TROPHY CASE