If you’ve ever felt like you’re more tired / listless / down than you think you should be, there are a couple of things you might as well try.
Vitamin D3
This is well known, so I’m not going to write very much about it. If you have an indoor job, you should probably never be taking less than 2000 IU of Vitamin D3 a day, uh, basically ever. But if you want to try seeing if it helps your mood, I suggest 5000 IU for at least a week. It’ll either help or it won’t, and regardless of what you read, I assure you that 5000 IU is harmless (and can provide documentation of this, but so can google). I’ll be happy to buy your excess if it doesn’t help. Vitamin D3 does not help my mood substantially, FWIW, but I know people for whom it does.
L-Methylfolate
This one is less well known. It also has both more significant risks and more significant rewards for those people that it helps.
This whole topic gets really complicated, but the short version is that some people have a mutation in their MTHFR gene (affectionately referred to, and not just by me, as the “motherfucker gene”) that messes up their methylation cycle such that L-Methylfolate supplementation makes a big difference.
For both me and my partner taking some every day is a basic, fundamental part of our mental health regimen.
Now, here’s the problem: for people with different-but-related mutations, L-Methylfolate can make mood worse. Best part: you can have both mutations at once. So fun.
However, worst case it’s not actually going to do any damage or anything, so it’s worth a shot.
Here’s the one I use, but I don’t think it matters.
My suggestion for trying this out, assuming you don’t have a genetic report that specifically calls out this issue, is to take 2000 mcg every day for a week. If that has no obvious effect, try 5000 for a week. If that has no obvious effect, stop (and sell me your excess).
If you do have a genetic report saying you have relevant mutations, you might want to try a pass with a much larger dose; my doctor had me on 15,000 mcg for a couple of months.
In all cases you should warn the people around you that you might have mood changes, but I’m not aware of this causing anything worse than just “being noticeably cranky”; for most people where it’s not a miracle it just doesn’t work.