(Not that it's a bad thing per se, of course.)
It has benefits and does work to enhance the benefits of caffeine. That said, this article over-hypes it, and it's really not that big of an impact.
Drinking tea is good for you, we've known this for years. Keep drinking it.
That's all I need to hear. I've been drinking tea since I was 4, and I'm not about to stop now.
I guess "you should" is the wrong language. Perhaps supplant with "it would be incredibly inconvenient but way cool if you were to"
I think their retail model is actually really interesting, and their blog is very transparent about the realities of the business: http://www.tearetailer.com/
Edit: Most of the places in the child comments are great too. I'd personally try to avoid Teavana, though. From my experience, they take low grade teas and sell them for a much higher price for the masses. I've also seen paint come off of some teaware there with little effort.
Its hard to explain rationally without sounding like a hipster, but I think I just got spoiled by the really cool tea shop I used to go to at school - it was like the kind of place you would find an ancient artifact of untold power in the corner behind a dusty basket of chocolate bars.
Not that that's the only kind of tea shop I would go to, but it really felt like a place owned by people who got it: they stayed open past their posted hours and when you walked in, whoever was working (there was a grand total of 4 people that worked there over the five years I went) would acknowledge you casually and never talk about product unless it really seemed like you wanted to.
I guess now I have to try it...
I've purchased some decent Silver Needle at Coffee and Tea Exchange in Lakeview - but the prices are a little high.
PS: I drink probably 3 cups a day. I am still not a genius and I get sleepy by mid-day.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine
Rather, its primary effect seems to increase the overall
level of the brain inhibitory transmitter GABA.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Aminobutyric_acid#Pharmac...
Drugs that act as agonists of GABA receptors or increase
the available amount of GABA typically have relaxing,
anti-anxiety and anti-convulsive effects.,. Many
of the substances below are known to cause anterograde
amnesia and retrograde amnesia.
Followed by a list of substances that increase GABA levels
Caffeine, I guess, will counter some of these effects, but still it makes me worried to play with brain chemistry. Particularly with supplements.
Edit: To one who downvoted, could you tell me what you found objectionable ?
Also, tea is more of a cultural phenomenon in that region of the world. It's not thought of as a tool for meditation. In fact, in yogic traditions, you're supposed to stay away from caffeine.
"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.
For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse?
However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.
This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...
As for your strawman about yogic monks: the article did not say "all monks..", just "monks...". The difference here is that without the qualifier, english assumes the statement refers to a significant portion, but not all or even most. Further, some traditions, such as various forms of Buddhism, particularly those that practice sitting meditation, do in fact have tea as part of the meditative ritual.
tl;dr - you are way over-simplifying and being generally disingenuous
For me, it doesn't work. I'm just too wired, my heart feels like it's going to pop out of my chest if I take an amount that will affect my actual concentration (not the same as alertness). Adderall, to me, feels like a much smoother caffeine, and I can concentrate. However, I hate the way it also makes me feel in high doses. Atomoxetine worked great for me as well, but had weird "sexual" side effects. Right now I'm mostly on Wellbutrin XL, which is a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, and while it doesn't work as well stimulants, it does work to a point and I feel like my normal self and even better. So far, the best combination for me has been Wellbutrin with a small kicker (5-10mg) of Adderall. Before Wellbutrin, I would take 20-60mg of Adderall a day. Also, Wellbutrin helps with some of my natural anxiety as well.
Also, for what it's worth, Adderall (a stimulant) tends to decrease anxiety for me in certain situations, while amplifying it in others. It's a weird relationship. In some social situations where tons of things are happening, without Adderall I can't focus on anything and I start to go on a weird panic mode. With adderall, that decreases because I can ignore certain things. But it also decreases with alcohol too, because I just don't care.
Anyways, the best thing I ever did was see a psychiatrist. Treatment of ADHD sucks because it's hard to know what will and what won't work, and what side effects are involved.
end tangent.
My "straw-man" was not meant to be anything as such. It was an example of a different meditation tradition where tea/coffee is to be avoided.
I used to never drink coffee or tea; when I really needed to "wake up" I'd have an espresso and I'd be good for 10-12 hours.
Then I had a kid and found myself needing it daily. After a few months of daily coffee I started to realize that I was exhausted until I drank some coffee; then I wasn't so tired but still couldn't concentrate very well.
Having read a similar article a few weeks ago I switched to tea instead of coffee and I must say I've felt much more productive on tea as well as slightly less exhausted before I drink it.
Would love to hear of others' anecdotal evidence.
For starters, with coffee there is the one-two punch that you get a sugar rush and then later on the caffeine kicks in. (I've read somewhere that caffeine takes about 6 hours to kick in, so if you're perking up straight away it is perhaps not the caffeine per se)
If you don't take sugar and it is the caffeine kicking in, it may be doing so in a particularly horrible and insidious way, that it is (mildly) addictive, and the perking up is simply the absence of the withdrawal symptoms (that old story about banging your head on a brick wall - it feels so good when you stop).
Anecdotally, something I found really interesting is that I play much better chess when I'm off caffeine than when I'm on.
Oh sure, on caffeine you feel all perky and smart and as if your brain is running ten times faster (or whatever), but I think what is actually happening is that we just get bored faster. On caffeine I might only think one or two moves ahead and then pick the moves that my intuition tells me. But off caffeine I can actually 'slow down' enough to play noticeably better, I can think an extra couple of moves ahead over and above the "do something now!!!" mode that caffeine puts me in.
If this is right, then caffeine makes me stupider, because I rush in, and can't sit still to do the deep thinking that really high quality thought and software design require.
If you ever get bulk l-theanine powder (it's quite cheap), you'll recognize the taste. It's particularly prominent in sencha, gyokuro, and other Japanese green teas - that savory/salty/MSGish taste.
Anecdotally, l-theanine negates most of the jitteriness from caffeine for me. Coffee, pop, etc. make me edgy in a way that tea doesn't.
What tea should we be drinking? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sencha
only chart I could find: http://www.o-cha.com/green-tea-benefits.htm
I'm able to buy loose leaf in bulk from a local store so I can't recommend a particular online retailer. In person I would go by smell rather than brand, the aroma of good sencha is very distinct.
Those medical studies are usually discarding the parallel social relation of drinking tea. Tea drinkers may have different habits than the coffee drinkers. This is similar than the "the children who have grown with books at home have better education", the reason is not really the books by them-self but more just a sign of the social behaviour. Might be the case of (some) tea drinkers.
http://russell.ballestrini.net/response-to-l-theanine-a-4000...
That said, I've had consistently good experiences with Adagio, and (once you know what you like) tea is well-suited to mail order.