It’s January. Should I Get A Happy Light?

You may have heard of the “winter blues and blahs” and wondered why in the world the chilly months of the year would make any difference at all for your emotional health. But this condition of being more likely to feel down during winter months is a real thing. And this is just one of the many ways that elements of your life can impact your emotional health without you even realizing it.

Think of your emotional state like a big playing field. On one side of that field is a more positive sunshiny attitude, and on the other is a more negative cloudy state. Events in your life can tilt that field toward the gloomy side and away from the sunny side. And once your field is tilted, it makes it much harder for you to schlog your way to the more positive side all on your own!

From a neuroscience perspective, certain stimuli into your brain can cause this emotional shift, and can also be completely imperceptible to you. So if you don’t know they’re even there, you won’t know why you have feelings of sadness or even depression.

What are these silent inputs that sneak into your brain without your awareness or permission to tilt the emotional playing field toward gloominess? One of them is simply the amount of light you perceive. It turns out that your emotional brain needs light. Not your retinas. Don’t go staring at the sun, shouting to the heavens, “I feel happy!” Obviously direct sunlight on the retinas would be damaging to your eyes.

Rather, your brain needs bright ambient light around you, which brings us back to the issue everyone faces with the winter.

• You wake up in the morning and it’s dark.
• You work all day in an office and never see the sky.
• You go home at the end of the day and it’s dark again.

Chronic low light can produce something called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD (link to a good review article by WebMD.).  SAD is a condition that can influence your mood during late fall and winter months. One solution to mitigate the impact of SAD is a light therapy box. This provides bright light and is normally placed around one’s workplace desk or other environment where you spend a great deal of time during your day.

This research from UNC Chapel Hill states that … “bright light treatment and dawn simulation for seasonal affective disorder and bright light for nonseasonal depression are efficacious, with effect sizes equivalent to those in most antidepressant pharmacotherapy trials”.

But don’t think that light therapy is some kind of one-stop-shopping for emotional health. Lots of things can tilt the emotional playing field you’re working with. Some of them are going to have a huge impact and others will have a small impact. So seriously, speak to your doctor about the possibility of light therapy and whether you need to combine that with other solutions as well.

By the way, light therapy boxes are portable and relatively affordable with costs ranging anywhere from $20 to $60 dollars. Here is a review from Health.com for the best ones currently out there.