Is GABA good for sleep?

A self-experiment using the Oura ring and a GABA supplement

Time for another experiment. And this time it’s about sleep.

I have been using oral GABA to go faster to sleep. But I wasn’t sure it really helped. This is because the days I used GABA were days when I had trouble getting to sleep anyway, which made it hard to tell if GABA had any effect. So I decided to run an experiment and compare it to placebo.

After this experiment, I stopped using GABA as a supplement, and you will understand why in the results.

The form of GABA naturally present in the brain, Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid, is well established as an amino acid that supports in reducing stress, and enhancing sleep. But, using GABA as a supplement is not the same. Several human clinical trials have been conducted, results regarding the role of natural and/or biosynthetic oral GABA intake on stress and sleep seem to be mixed.

Summary of the results: GABA did not meet my expectations

I was expecting increased deep sleep, and total sleep, with GABA, but that did not seem to be the case. The results were:
➜ Less deep sleep compared to placebo, as measured by the Oura ring.
➜ Faster sleep compared to placebo, as measured by the Oura ring.
➜ Subjective feelings of drowsiness compared to placebo.

Note that the experiment is too small to truly make any conclusions on the statistical significance of the results.
That is why I stopped taking GABA for the purpose of enhancing sleep, but I still think there is potential for the use of GABA as a supplement for other purposes or in a different form than the existing supplements.

PS: if you’re interested in self-experimentation or want to get updates about the experiments I’m running feel free to join my mailing list here: https://ismail.bio/subscribe

Method: How I took the GABA supplement

How much GABA I took and how much time did it take to get a result.

What each day contained: GABA vs. Placebo

• Which GABA supplement I took: Thorne’s PharmaGABA-100 supplement
  (note that this also contains: Calcium Laurate, Hypromellose Capsule, Magnesium Citrate and Microcrystalline Cellulose)
• How much GABA: 2 capsules with 100mg of GABA each (200mg in total).
• Placebo: I used acacia fiber as placebo. 2 x capsules on Placebo days.
• Blinding: I had a friend place the Placebo pills and GABA pills in similar jars, label them as A and B, and keep which one is A and which one is B under the jars (in a way that I could not see them). And for some extra “double blinding”, I did not check the meaning of A and B until I was done with the analysis. When this was done, I replaced the values in the visualisations below (GABA ended up being A, and Placebo being B).
• Timing: I took GABA 15min before going to bed.

Results

Before discussing the main results, it is good to note that there was no difference in bedtime and total sleep time in both experiments. The main results were that on days I used GABA, my deep sleep seems to be lower while it still seemed like I went faster to sleep.

Lower deep sleep with GABA supplementation

The first result that surprised me was that my deep sleep seemed lower with GABA intake. This goes contrary to a lot of the research that claims that GABA supplementation increases deep non-rem sleep. However as discussed in a systematic review [Hepsomali et al. 2020] the GABA supplementation studies fail to show any beneficial effect of GABA intake other than sleep latency (if at all).

Lower deep sleep with Oral GABA supplementation

The graphs here do not show statistical significance, but they give a better idea of how much difference there was between GABA and placebo.

Interpretation: why GABA may reduce deep sleep

I suspect this is due to the fact that after taking in GABA only increases plasma levels of GABA the first couple of minutes and then causes lower levels than the original baseline.

• ~30 minutes after supplementation: rapid increase of plasma GABA concentration. This may be responsible for the reduction in sleep latency.
• ~60 minutes after supplementation: a rapid decrease of plasma GABA concentration which may explain a lowering of deep sleep.

What plasma GABA levels “may” look like with oral supplementation, based on a systematic review of [Hepsomali et. al 2020] (these are not actual plasma levels of GABA but an illustration of what it may look like)

Faster to sleep with GABA

On the upside, I was getting faster to sleep with GABA. While as you can see there is an outlier value where it shows much longer, but even when this outlier is taken away (figure in the middle) it still seems that I slept faster with GABA.

Changes in Sleep latency (Lower)

This is consistent with my subjective feeling, with existing research and with the interpretation above.

Would I sacrifice deep sleep over faster sleep? It feels tempting, but most of the time I would prefer not to do that. Especially when there are other alternatives.

Possible confounding factors

Other things may have interfered with this self-experiment.

It is possible that my sleep on a weekend day is different from the rest of the weekdays. This experiment was only 12 days long, so we should check how the weekends and weekdays were split between GABA days and Placebo days.

Number of weekdays with GABA and number of weekends with GABA (you can see that weekends were mostly Placebo whereas weekdays were mostly GABA days)

As you can see, weekends consisted mostly of Placebo days, whereas weekdays consisted mostly of GABA days. It is possible that the results we saw earlier were impacted by that. In other words, that my deep sleep seemed longer during a Placebo day just because it was a weekend.

The different ways my deep sleep could have been affected

Without doing any complex statistics, the relationship between deep sleep and weekend/weekdays did not seem as high as the relationship between GABA and Placebo.

As I mentioned earlier, the following variables did not seem to differ : bedtime, wake-up time had no difference, neither did total time in bed. I also compared subjective measures of exercise intensity as these can also have an effect, but there was no major difference.

Conclusion

In this case both my gut feeling and the emotionless data agreed, and I stopped taking GABA.

This shows the benefit of experimenting yourself and not basing everything on existing research. What works for most people, does not work for a few people, and you may be part of the few people. Remember that this does not mean no one would benefit from GABA supplementation. If anything, there probably are a lot of people who would.

This experiment could be improved if it lasts about 28 days and if we design it to take into account all the possible confounding factors (exercise, weekends etc.).

If you have done any statistics in the past, you will know that this visual analysis is not enough to make any conclusions. But if you have done any self-experimentation, you would also understand that there is a sweet spot between what is statistically relevant and keeping your sanity.