It’s the most wonderful time of year! It’s also the time of year where Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) can really take over people’s lives. The winter months are often darker, cold, and sometimes the sun doesn’t come out as much, which leads to people experiencing episodes of major depression.
Seasonal affective disorder is associated with serotonergic dysregulation, meaning that the mood stabilizers are a little out of order. It may overlap with similar diagnoses like general anxiety disorder, panic disorder, bulimia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome, and others.
How do you combat these feelings that tend to happen annually? Oftentimes SAD can be treated with light therapy. Research is showing that light therapy is more effective if administered in the morning. And it can be done simply from home!
A Guide to Light Therapy:
In light therapy (aka phototherapy), you sit just a few feet from a special light lamp within the first hour of waking up each day. Think of it as greeting the sunrise – but the sun rises on your timeline. Light therapy mimics natural outdoor light and appears to cause a change in brain chemicals linked to mood and sleep.
The dosage most often found to be effective is 5,000 lux per day, given as 2,500 lux for two hours or 10,000 lux for 30 minutes. By exposing your eyes to light similar to sunlight, light therapy helps realign your circadian rhythm with the patterns of the sun. As a result, you feel more tired in the evening, as sunlight lowers, and more awake in the morning when the sun rises.
For those who experience SAD symptoms, light therapy has been effective in many cases. Additionally, light therapy can be helpful for people who experience:
- Insomnia
- Circadian rhythm sleep disorder
- Depression
- Jet lag
- Working an overnight schedule
- Alzheimer’s disease or dementia
To ensure an adequate response, patients should be treated with light therapy units that are specifically designed to treat SAD. Units that are not specifically designed for SAD treatment may not provide adequate brightness and may not have appropriate ultraviolet light filtration.
Here are some we recommend:
Written with guidance from Dr. Edwards
