Theanine: a Sleep Supporting Amino Acid

“I keep falling asleep, but waking up an hour or two later.” “I never feel well-rested when waking up.” “Why don’t I stay asleep?” 

These are all questions that I, and many others, have asked ourselves about our sleep cycles throughout our professional careers. I often get home from a grueling day and find that I can’t fall asleep, or worse, continually wake up throughout the night. Looking for an answer, I found a study titled, “A Novel Theanine Complex, Mg-L-Theanine Improves Sleep Quality via Regulating Brain Electrochemical Activity.” In it, a group of scientists studies exactly what theanine can do for the brain, and what it does for sleep.

In this study, scientists looked at the effect of theanine in mice, specifically, its effects as an amino acid to help them fall asleep and stay asleep. It goes further to see how this acid reacts in the presence of caffeine in the mice. Simply put, the study found that theanine can help users fall asleep, stay asleep, and can even counteract the effects of caffeine. This happens for a few reasons.

For one, the introduction of theanine increased serotonin and melatonin levels. (For more info on that, see our blog post about tryptophan). Further, the theanine helped decrease brain activity in the mice, allowing them to have a deeper, longer sleep. The study goes further to say that when caffeine was present, theanine greatly improved the mice’s sleep quality and reduced sleep latency (how long it took them to fall asleep) compared to the caffeinated control group. The findings of this study support L-theanine’s use in Dormyx™, the melatonin-free sleep support supplement offered by Verisoma™.

Verisoma™ is committed to producing True to Body™ supplement blends. In sleep supporting supplements like Dormyx™, that means giving your body the nutrients it needs to properly regulate its own sleep, as opposed to medicating your body with extraneous sedatives or hormones. Whether you have trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, or consume caffeine during the day, theanine could help you wind down before bedtime. If you live a life of fast-paced, high-intensity work, but suffer from low-quality sleep, theanine, a key ingredient in Dormyx™, could be a solution for you.