Ever wondered why a cup of tea can help you relax while a cup of coffee wakes you up? Besides the lower levels of caffeine, tea contains L-theanine, a unique amino acid that may help relieve stress. It’s also a weight-loss alternative to help your body stay healthy.
If you’re looking to reduce your stress, L-Theanine can help you loosen up with its many benefits. Here’s everything you need to know about L-Theanine and how it could provide the stress relief you need.
What Is L-Theanine?
L-Theanine is a non-essential amino acid in black tea, green tea, and certain mushrooms. This amino acid has been linked to the health benefits of tea for centuries. In recent years, it has gained recognition due to its ability to improve neurotransmitter function, promote relaxation, enhance mood, and provide antioxidant benefits.
How Does L-Theanine Help With Stress?
While caffeine is a stimulant that keeps you awake, L-Theanine is a relaxant that calms you down. The relaxing effect of L-Theanine is thanks to its ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. From there, it acts on your brain’s inhibitory neurotransmitters and stops mental stress by inhibiting specific neurons.
L-Theanine also helps your brain produce alpha waves, which are associated with feelings of relaxation. It triggers the release of GABA, a neurotransmitter that “calms down” the brain. GABA regulates nerve excitability, resulting in relaxation. GABA naturally lessens brain activity to aid in relaxation.
Other Benefits Of L-Theanine
In addition to stress relief and relaxation, L-Theanine has a laundry list of other benefits. Studies have shown that L-Theanine can help:
- Improve concentration, alertness, and memory
- Control blood sugar
- Promote heart health
- Improve liver function
- Reduce blood pressure
- Reduce inflammation due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties
- Remove waste left behind by free radicals that can cause skin damage (aka helps your skin look healthy)
Combining L-Theanine With Collagen
As you probably know by now, collagen can help support healthy bones, joints, muscles, and skin.* But did you know L-Theanine can improve the properties of collagen? Because stress can weaken our natural collagen production, having L-Theanine can naturally help combat stressors which in turn can help boost natural collagen production.
Looking for an easy way to get your fix of collagen and L-Theanine? Look no further than our Organic Matcha Collagen. By combining our original unflavored collagen peptides with organic Japanese matcha powder, you are getting all of the benefits of collagen and L-Theanine in one scoop. Learn more about matcha here.
If you prefer to stick with our Unflavored Collagen Peptides, add a scoop to your favorite hot tea to get your daily dose of both.
It’s no secret that L-Theanine is growing in popularity because of its natural benefits and the calming properties of it are also well-documented, making it a popular choice for stress relief. If you’re looking for a way to relieve stress or any of the other many benefits of this powerful amino acid, start enjoying a cup of green tea or matcha to help your worries melt away ;)
