I want to describe what happens when your blood sugar crashes.

Your blood glucose drops below the normal range. Your pancreas stops producing insulin, which it was doing too aggressively because of whatever refined carbohydrate you ate 90 minutes ago. Your liver releases stored glucose to compensate. Your adrenal glands release epinephrine, which is adrenaline, to accelerate that process.

Epinephrine is adrenaline. Its job is to mobilize the body under stress. It raises heart rate, increases alertness, drives glucose into the bloodstream. It produces exactly the physiological signature that anxiety produces: elevated heart rate, heightened arousal, a sense that something is wrong.

If you experience anxiety and you are eating refined carbohydrates regularly — white bread, crackers, sweetened drinks, pastries, instant oatmeal, anything with a high glycemic index and not much fiber or protein — you are manufacturing stress responses from the inside, multiple times a day, through a completely separate mechanism from whatever is driving your anxiety clinically.

Continuous glucose monitoring has made this pattern visible in a way it wasn't before. The glycemic variability that CGM data reveals in people eating a typical Western diet — the spikes and crashes, multiple times per day — correlates consistently with mood instability and reported anxiety. People with stable glycemic patterns report steadier mood; people with large swings report more anxiety, more irritability, more craving.

The dietary fix is structural, not additive. You do not fix blood sugar instability by adding something — a supplement, a specific food. You fix it by changing what the meal is built on: protein at every meal, fiber from vegetables and legumes and whole grains, no refined carbohydrate eaten in isolation, no skipped meals.

This is why, in Simmerstate's anxiety protocol, blood sugar stability is the first priority — above specific nutrients, above fermented foods, above everything else. You cannot build a stable mood architecture on an unstable glycemic foundation.

The practical version: breakfast with protein — eggs, Greek yogurt, smoked salmon, turkey — not toast alone, not cereal, not a bagel. Lunch with the same structure. Dinner with complex carbohydrate plus protein, not refined carbohydrate alone. No meal longer than four or five hours without something with protein and fat to anchor the glucose response.

For a lot of people with anxiety, this change alone — nothing dramatic, no elimination, no calorie restriction — produces a measurable difference in day-to-day stability within two to three weeks. Not because anxiety is a blood sugar problem. Because one of the physiological contributors to it is, and removing that contributor gives the clinical work more room to operate.