How Drinking Tea Can Help You Feel Less Anxious

Anybody who knows me knows that I have a healthy obsession with tea. I love all kinds of tea and I can usually be seen drinking it at any time throughout the day. Not only do I love the flavour and aroma, but I'm also always cold so having a cup of tea does wonders to warm me up from the inside out - ultimately making me feel more alert and alive.

But I also love tea because of the sense of calmness it instills in me. I've always associated coffee as a beverage that people enjoy on the go, but having a good cup of tea requires you to slow down and have a break from your busy schedule. Because of this, I've always seen drinking tea as a way for me to relax, unwind, and calm down.

As it turns out, tea actually has properties within it, an amino acid called L-Theanine, that help you with this very process. So if you're interested in a bit of scientific research on how drinking tea can help you with your stress and anxiety, read the article below. (The original article is from Onomea Tea Company. 

Self Medicating Anxiety with Tea? by John Lee 

Reducing Anxiety with Theanine 

Making the case for a cup of tea…an amino acid in tea may be just what you need to feel less anxious. 

Whether taken as a supplement or in cups of tea, l-theanine is safe and helps many people reduce stress and anxiety. Research shows that l-theanine induces alert/relaxed thinking states, reduces your fight-or flight response to stressful events and helps protect the mind from stress-linked thinking and memory deficits. 

What Is L-Theanine? 

L-theanine, or theanine, is a water soluble amino acid that’s found in tea leaves; it’s also available at higher concentrations as a dietary supplement (one dose equaling roughly 10 cups of tea). When you drink tea, l-theanine passes through the blood-brain barrier and affects the brain directly. L-theanine shares a very similar chemical structure to the neurotransmitter glutamate – which is a transmitter involved in learning and memory. Consuming theanine increases the production of GABA and dopamine. 

How Does It Induce Relaxation? 

One way it promotes relaxation is by reducing sympathetic nervous system activation in stressful situations. When stressed, your body goes into fight or flight mode – heart rate and blood pressure spike, respiration grows shallower and more rapid, pupils dilate and perspiration increases; your body gets ready to fight a threat or flee the scene! Chronic sympathetic nervous system over-activation is unpleasant (you feel stressed out!) and can lead to serious health problems, like cardiovascular disease or dementia. 

But theanine can help: Studies show that people who take theanine prior to stressful situations have a decreased sympathetic nervous system response to that stress. 

What Other Benefits Does It Have? 

Theanine has neuroprotective effects – it protects the brain from excess glutamate toxicity. 

It is an antioxidant and it inhibits lipid peroxidation. Both black and green teas have strong antioxidant properties. It works as a cancer fighter and anti-tumor agent. Theanine can increase the effectiveness of some chemotherapy agents. 

Side Effects or Long-Term Health Concerns? 

L-theanine is very well tolerated. People have been drinking green and black tea for a very long time without experiencing health problems. In rare cases, drinking too much tea can lead to digestive upset or nausea. Animal model studies show that even at very high doses, sustained ingestion of theanine causes no significant adverse effects. 

*However, a typical cup of coffee contains between 2 and 3 times as much caffeine as an equivalent amount of black tea. If you’re already a coffee drinker, swapping out a cup or two per day for a few cups of brewed tea shouldn’t cause any noticeable differences. 

How Much L-Theanine in a Cup of Tea? 

Researchers at the University of Bristol experimented to find out how much l-theanine you’d find in a cup of normally brewed commercial tea. They found that longer brewing times led to higher quantities of the amino acid, but on average: 

A typical 200 ml cup of brewed black tea contained 24.2 mg of l-theanine (+ or – 5.7 mg). 

A typical cup of brewed green tea contained 7.9 mg (+ or – 3.8 mg)

L-theanine supplements are typically sold as 200 mg doses, so if you drink 8 cups of black tea per day – or many more cups of green tea – you’ll get the same quantity of the amino acid as you’d get by taking a supplement. 

If you want to get very serious about extracting the maximum quantity of l-theanine from each pot of tea, then follow the advice of researchers from The University of Newcastle in Australia, who tested various extraction methods to see which yielded the best results. They say, to get the highest possible amount of L-theanine: 

Steep tea at 80 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes

Use a water to tea ratio of 20 ml per 1 gram

Steep tea that is between 0.5 and 1 mm in particle size. (Crush the dry tea leaves if larger to get the most theanine out of the leaves). 

Research Supporting L-Theanine for Relaxation

Theanine vs. Xanax? 

Researchers in Australia compared 200 mg of theanine to 1 mg of Xanax. Subjects were given either theanine, Xanax or a placebo during either a resting task (baseline) or a task that provoked anxiety.

Theanine worked better than Xanax to induce relaxation during the resting task, though neither theanine nor Xanax had any significant effects during the anxiety task. 

L-theanine supplements are typically sold as 200 mg doses – or 8 to 10 times as much as you’d get from a typical cup of brewed black tea. So would you experience any relaxation effect after drinking just a couple of cups of tea? 

To find out, researchers in the Netherlands took EEG measurements of healthy study subjects from 45 minutes to 105 minutes after ingesting 50 mg of l-theanine (approximately 2 cups worth). 

They found that even at this moderate dose, compared to subjects given a placebo, those given l-theanine displayed significantly more alpha brain wave activity. 

Alpha waves signify an alert but relaxed brain. 

Theanine to Protect Against Stress-Linked Memory Problems 

Chronic elevated stress can harm your memory. The theanine in tea may protect your brain from this negative consequence. Some very recent animal model research (June 2013) shows that theanine protects the brain against stress-caused memory impairments – probably by defending against the toxic impact of stress hormones. 

A group of rats were divided into two experimental conditions. One group received three weeks of pre-treatment with theanine and the other group did not. After three weeks, all rats were put under severe stress. Control rats experienced stress-caused visual memory impairments but rats pretreated with theanine did not. Rats pretreated with theanine had a much smaller corticosterone level increase than control rats, which likely explains the differing results on the memory tests. 

Theanine to Block Stress-Related Blood Pressure Spikes 

Some people experience more significant blood pressure increases during periods of high stress.Researchers in Japan ran an experiment to see what effect theanine had on stress-related blood pressure increases. 

Study subjects were given a placebo or 200 mg of theanine and then tested on mental and physical performance under different conditions: at rest, under psychological stress and under physiological stress.

Compared to placebo, theanine lowered blood pressure increases associated with stress situations.This effect was greatest for subjects who experienced the greatest change from resting blood pressure to stress-situation blood pressure during placebo trials.

My Experience: Part I - My Story

I haven’t posted in over a month. I didn’t forget about my blog or give up on it but I was going through a down period and I needed to focus on me for a little while. I also knew the next couple of posts I wanted to write were to describe my personal experience of getting diagnosed and dealing with the effects of depression and it was hard to work up the courage to tell this story.

In 2010/2011 I went on an exchange to England for a year. It was the best year of my life! I experienced a new culture, I met so many amazing people and made some of my best friends, I travelled all the time. It was perfect. Then I returned home to Canada and things got hard. I was thrown back into a more strict society with higher expectations; it was like culture shock in my own country. Friendships had dwindled over the year as people’s lives continued on without me while I was gone. It was my last year of university and for the first time ever I found school work to be a chore. It wasn’t hard, I had just changed. I used to be the person who identified myself by my grades and focused only on school work, to the detriment of all other aspects of my life. But now I had experienced a different way of life, a more relaxed way of life; I felt alive. I wanted to travel and explore and meet new people and socialize; school just wasn’t as important as it used to be. But I had gotten straight A’s throughout my past 3 years of university and I knew I’d be very disappointed in myself if I didn’t get straight A’s in my final year, so as hard as it was to concentrate, I pushed myself to give it my all. In the end it paid off and on graduation day I was happy when I received a medal for graduating at the top of my class. It was worth it. But I was burnt out.

Throughout the year I also diagnosed myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder. After being in England for a year I was certainly sun deprived. Then came the cold Canadian winter (which I usually love because I ski/snowboard/skate/snowshoe) but for the first time, I hated it. I started sleeping a lot, stopped trekking to the gym, went outside as few times as possible and eventually started skipping most of my classes (which I NEVER did before!) I think the lack of sunlight, the endlessly long, cold winter, and my pure exhaustion from school just did me in. My body gave up, it didn’t want to try and fight anymore.

After my year abroad I had also gone through a break up. The break up itself didn’t contribute to my depression, but there were consequences to that relationship that were now fairly evident. For 3 and a half years my life had revolved around one person and now that he was gone, I was alone. I had given up most of my hobbies and we had spent all of our time together so I now realized that I really didn’t have any friends. This certainly affected my mood – I had no support network, no one to share stories with, no social life. It was just me. I love having alone time, but when all my time was spent by myself and I had no one to do anything with it got incredibly lonely.

In May 2012, right after I finished my last year of university, I was officially diagnosed with depression. I went on a dopamine medication and immediately had a bad reaction so my doctor switched me to a serotonin medication that seemed to have more promise.  But despite having just gotten diagnosed with depression, I still decided to move back to England for law school. In hindsight, that was probably a bad idea. I loved England, I made more awesome friends, but being in another country, so far away from my family, at a time when I was really struggling made things worse. I was fine for the first semester, the change and the excitement was enough to boost my spirits. But then second semester came along and I was 100% burnt out. I couldn’t focus on school; I had no interest in it anymore. The grey, rainy weather in England put a damper on my already low mood. I had no motivation to do any of the fun activities I had planned to do, and I barely saw my friends any more. I stopped going to class, even though I was on a VISA and could get kicked out of the country for not showing up. I stopped going out with my friends. I didn’t travel anymore. I didn’t even get dressed or leave the house. It also didn’t helping that I was dating (and living with) a guy who turned out to have zero aspirations in life – his negative outlook on life really brought me down. I decided to break up with my boyfriend, take a leave of absence from law school and return to Canada. Packing up and getting myself to the airport was an enormous task for me, I’d say it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. It was so hard for me to gather the motivation to actually do something and to leave the house and catch a train to the airport seemed impossible. I almost didn’t get up the morning I had to leave because I couldn’t coax myself to get out of bed and face the day. The only thing that got me moving was knowing that I was going home and that I could then get into my own bed and not have to move again for as long as I wanted.

Being home actually made a huge difference. It was nice to see my family and my dog. It was summer time and I live on the lake so I could just relax and soak up the sun. I was happy. And I thought I was cured. I had stopped taking my medication while in England, a few months before I came home. I found it really wasn’t helping me and I actually thought it was making me worse. Now that I was home, I was glad I wasn’t on any meds, I don't like the idea of putting all these unnatural chemicals into my body, I much rather find my own personal, natural ways of healing, so I was happy that all I needed to cure me was to come home and be with my family in the sun.

So I had dealt with depression (officially) for just over a year – May 2012 until June 2013. And then I was fine. I was still struggling to get back into a routine of working and moving out of my parents’ house, but I was happy. I eventually moved to Toronto in January 2014 and started working in February. I then got a second job in March and I loved how busy I was. After so long of doing nothing and being bored of doing nothing but not having the motivation to do anything else, a full schedule felt like heaven! Until the end of March, when it all came crashing down again.

March 2014 – I had been free from depression for almost 10 months and all of a sudden I felt my world spinning out of control again. Maybe I was never really completely free from it the first time. Maybe it was just a false sense of happiness from switching up my routine. I’m not sure. But I was certain that I was dealing with a relapse.

I missed work one night because I suffered an awful panic attack and couldn’t stop shaking and crying for hours. The next day I quit that job. I started struggling to wake up to get to my 9-5 job downtown and I either missed days or came in late. Eventually we worked out a revised schedule where I worked 11:30-5 instead. That helped for a while, but as time went on that also became too hard. I wasn’t falling asleep until around 4 or 5am, so waking up in the morning was actually impossible. Even when I managed to get to work, I couldn’t concentrate and it took forever to get anything done. I eventually just stopped going to work altogether. I reluctantly went back on medication (a different kind then the previous 2 I had tried). It’s working better I think. I also started seeing an acupuncturist (more on that later) and he really helped me deal with some of my issues. I’m still struggling with the relapse. But I can definitely say I’m on the rise again. And this time I’m not going to assume my recovery. I’m going to work hard and make some serious life changes so I can hopefully eliminate depression from my life altogether.

I know this post is incredibly long!! But whether anyone reads this to the end or not, I thought it was important to tell my background story of how I got to where I am today, if not for anyone else’s benefit, then at least for my own, as a record of my past and what I’ve been through. In my next post I will discuss all the feelings and emotions I have experienced when in my states of depression to give people an understanding of what I go through, and to help those of you dealing with depression see that you’re not alone in experiencing these troubling feelings. 

Depression and Stress

One of the major causes of depression, like many other illnesses, is stress. Stress can be defined as our body’s response to a threat, whether it be real or merely perceived.  Stress can be positive such as getting married or having a baby, or it can be negative such as losing a job or the death of a loved one. Both types of stress can overwhelm us and cause health problems if not properly managed.

Being constantly exposed to stress can lead to something called the General Adaptation Syndrome. This includes three stages that people may go through when dealing with a lot of stress and if the stress is not managed properly at the beginning stages, it can lead to depression.

The first stage is the alarm stage. This is your body’s response to a threat. In this stage, your body releases an increase in the hormones cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline which leads to the fight or flight response.

The second stage is called the resistance stage. Here your body uses up a lot of cortisol in order to produce more energy so your body can resist the stressor. The problem is that if you’re in this stage for a long period of time then your body is producing an excessive amount of cortisol. This can cause you to feel anxious, tired and have difficulty sleeping since all your energy is devoted to dealing with the stressor.

The final stage is known as the exhaustion stage. This is where your body has produced so much cortisol that it can no longer produce any more, or can only produce a limited amount. Your body has essentially been over-worked and is too exhausted to continue functioning properly. As a result, you may feel fatigued, sluggish, burned out, irritable, cold, sore, more susceptible to illnesses and headaches, have a low sex drive, have a hard time coping, or suffer from depression.

People who reach the exhaustion stage are at risk of becoming depressed because they’ve been exposed to one or more stressors over such a long period of time that their body has depleted all its resources to fight and has essentially just given up, causing the person to feel burned out and depressed.

Another theory of how stress can lead to depression is known as learned helplessness. This is where a person experiences stressful events repeatedly to the point that they feel helpless to change the situation, like they lack the ability to control their own lives. When people start thinking in a negative way like this it can increase their susceptibility to developing depression.

Stress also affects people’s coping mechanisms. When you’re stressed it causes you to have a lower mood which in turn causes you to stop taking part in the activities that you enjoy which ultimately makes you feel worse and decreases your mood even more. This vicious cycle can lead you to feel depressed because the stress is taking over your life, it’s constantly on your mind and it has interrupted your usual outlet for coping.

Some examples of stressful events that may increase a person’s chances of becoming depressed are:

• being in an abusive relationship
• unemployment
• debt
• taking on extra responsibilities at home or work
• choosing a path in life that you aren’t entirely happy with but are scared to change
• going through a transition period in one’s life such as leaving your family home to move out on your own, having a baby, or retiring and having to learn to adjust your lifestyle since you have more time on your hands but a reduction in your finances

It is important to try and find ways to manage or reduce the stress in your life so you don’t start feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, out of control and/or depressed. Some tips are to:

• eat healthy (refined carbs like white bread and sugary foods release insulin which triggers the release of cortisol which causes stress)
• exercise (it helps grow new brain cells and maintain the health of existing ones)
• get at least eight hours of sleep
• do something that makes you happy or relaxes you so you can get your mind off of the stressor
• reduce your caffeine intake since it stimulates the same hormones that increase stress
• try to follow a daily routine to get yourself back on track
• practice deep breathing exercises, yoga, or other forms of meditation

Potential Causes of Depression

Depression can be caused by a variety of things. What causes depression brings up the nature vs. nurture debate, however, both seem to play a role in how people may develop depression. Life experiences, family history, and negative thoughts/attitudes/beliefs/behaviours can all lead to depression. In order to take the appropriate steps to recovery, it’s important to try and pinpoint the cause of your depression.

Here is a list of some potential causes for your consideration:

• Stress
• Genetics
• Lack of sufficient sunlight 
• Socio-economic factors (e.g. low income, prejudice)
• Negative and/or irrational thoughts
• Unhealthy diet
• Living in the past
• Life events (e.g. abusive relationships, traumatic events, divorce, starting at a new school or job)
• Lack of exercise
• Certain health conditions (e.g. stroke, AIDS, cancer)
• Hormone imbalance
• Thyroid imbalance
• The presence of toxic elements in your immune system (e.g. mercury, lead)
• Child birth
• Alcohol and/or drug use
• Side effects from certain medications

If you feel like you might be dealing with depression, you can check out my articles What is Depression?, Types of Depression and Symptoms of Depression for more info.