Here are some strange anxiety related effects I have noticed while on a very high fat, low carb diet that I experimented with.
These accounts are, of course, anecdotal, but perhaps we can discuss the possible causes.
When my fat intake was above 80 or so grams a day and my carb intake very low I noticed increased anxiety and proneness to anxiety attack and social disorder. I have no idea why, admittedly, but when I lowered my fat intake and increased carbs it apparently almost disappeared completely.
Another is fear of heights/agoraphobia. This is weird because growing up in new york city I had a fear of heights when I was a child but it was never extremely paralyzing and I pretty much overcame it by going to the world trade center courtyard almost every day after school and staring straight up at the buildings till I wasn't afraid of them anymore.
I would walk up to the corner columns and lean backwards against them, staring straight up till I became 'friends' with the buildings, and felt almost as if they were 'protecting' me. Of course then came 9/11 a couple years later but that's not really an issue since I didn't feel weird around tall buildings afterwards for the longest time, and my experiences with the trade center helped me to successfully overcome my fear of extreme heights (at least consciously).
Some time over the past 2 years I began to notice an increased paralysis around tall objects, not even extremely tall objects really, just any vertical object taller than a hundred feet really, like cell phone towers, church steeples, etc.
It seems to have coincided with when I began to experiment with a paleo-ish high fat diet.
This psycho-physiological effect seems to wane when my fat intake is on the lower side, around 50-60 grams a day or lower, while increasing my carb intake.
Then there was this sudden fear of the open sky, which seems to have disappeared with lowering fat and increasing carbs.
I have absolutely no idea why this is. I wonder if it may have anything to do with the phenotype discussion I was having with skot on another thread.
Thoughts?