S.A.D. and Lightboxes

Put on your boots.
Put on your coat.
Put on your hat and gloves.
And take a nice half hour walk or more every day. Eat healthy food. Don't watch too much tv. Paint a room in your house. Get together with friends. Get out of the house and walk, walk, walk. You'll feel great and look great. Go skiing, sledding, ice skating. Keep moving.

I would say this is very good advice. Winter blues or as some call it cabin fever has never been an issue with me.

I saw a new product on the local news yesterday for SAD. It was a pair of strange looking glasses that required no power/batteries and you wear it for 20 minutes a day. The wrap around lens was very similar to the plastic from a CD with the irridecent reflections when light hit it. These very new glasses are supposed to work the same way as the light boxes; fooling your brain to release some chemical.

I've searched all over the Internet but have been unable to find the product that I saw on the news yesterday.

I have a HappyLite Jr. that I use sporadically. I should use it regularly, but I don't.

It does help. It is not dramatic (at least for me), but it helps stave off the worst of the symptoms.

Use it in the morning before the sun comes up. You are trying to ADD hours of light to your day. Duration varies depending on how much extra light you need, which in turn depends on your own personal requirements and the latitude you live at and the climate there. If you live in cloudy coastal Alaska, you might need several hours per day in the depths of winter. If you live in New Mexico, not nearly so much.

Using it at night is better than nothing, but it tends to wake you up, so it would be like drinking coffee in the evening.

Try 45 minutes or so while you are getting ready for work, for example.

If you have a desk job, take it to work and use it there. That doesn't help as much, since it is already daylight, but if you have no window at work it might help a lot.

You really need to do it regularly to get good results. Its sort of like malnutrition - you can't just take a vitamin on a day when you are run down, you need it every day to stay healthy.

These are all good things to do, but if you have this particular medical condition, they will not help.

If they help, you don't have this condition.

Doing happy stuff will not correct your S.A.D. any more than they will cure scurvy. S.A.D. is a chemical imbalance due to a lack of full-spectrum light. The solution is to get more light.

Once you have addressed that, it is MUCH easier to do all the good things you mentioned.

Thanks for the comments. I do agree that under normal circumstances getting out in as much natural daylight as you can and being active does help overall mood but S.A.D. isn't just a dose of the blues because the weather's bad or the hours of daylight are short.

S.A.D. can be terribly debilitating for some and in extreme cases approach that of post-natal depression so anything that can or may help is great.

There's a lot of marketing hype about how good the lightboxes are so I thought I'd come here and ask the experts.

Keep it coming guys!