When I had my depressive episode in Berkeley, KF - the community anarcho-pharmacologist at the time - suggested I get a bottle of B vitamin complex capsules, open one up, and take 1/3 of it sublingually. I pepped up very noticeably, and followed this up with dessicated beef liver pills, which did *not* seem to correspondingly help. Getting good quality liver seemed like too much of a hassle so I let the matter drop. KF (or possibly KG, who I was dating) also recommended tyrosine, which I tried sublingually and found it pepped me up too, but differently.
Since 2017 I experimented with a Paleoish diet, and found my weight and energy levels improved a lot. I also got gout but that's medicable and tbh it's worth it. I also started eating organ meat a bit more afterwards, and found that it noticeably pepped me up, much like the B-Complex pills.
Over the past few months I've been experimenting with a mostly-carnivore, keto diet, and using the Cronometer app to count carbs. As a side effect, it informed me about some potential subclinical micronutrient deficiencies. I combined this with Chris Masterjohn's info on vitamins to generate micronutrient deficiency hypotheses to test. A quick-dissolve biotin lozenge didn't seem to help, but Magnesium Citrate is effectively, for me, an anxiolytic nootropic with similar benefits to CBD. Magnesium Threonate seems to independently help, but less so, as do hot epsom salt baths. Methylated Folate made me feel slightly better. And one night when I'd been craving fruit, I chewed up a Thiamin pill, and the craving went away. Even on Paleo I sometimes had carb cravings with a slight edge to them which I can recognize in hindsight as a nutritional deficiency induced panic. Since I've been supplementing with thiamin, nothing like that - I'm just hungry sometimes.
So, the heuristics I've been using for investigation:
- Try things sublingually when possible.
- Look for large fast effects. If it doesn't unambiguously do something within half an hour (or 5m if sublingual), it's probably not worth distinguishing from placebo.
- Nutrition tracking can help identify hypotheses. Cronometer seems like by far the best tool, especially if you can find entries for your diet in the NCCDB, the best data source it has.
- Descriptions of what micronutrients do is also somewhat helpful.
- The cost of crushing up a B complex capsule and keeping it under your tongue is low enough, the upside is high enough, and the incidence of mild deficiencies is high enough, that everyone should at least be testing this, even if you'd want to follow up a positive result by isolating the deficiency (going one vitamin at a time) and finding a whole food source. Magnesium deficiency is also pretty common, so it's worth trying that one empirically too.
- Don't let the best be the enemy of the good - whole food sources are heuristically better for people without relevant autoimmune issues but vitamin pills are better than just ignoring the problem, unless you really hate pills and powders.