What we’ve said about Light therapy

“the most important, quote, medications for depression are behavioral activation, exercise, light exposure, and psychotherapy”

“telling patients to get 15 minutes of sunlight within the first hour of them waking up”

“Even on an overcast day, the blue wavelength still gets through. The ideal thing is go outside and do something active in the morning. The Western solution is buy a light box and stay on your computer”

“I do this to combine light exposure with behavioral activation, something that we know to be effective for depression. And I simply ask patients to make a point, make a goal to get out every morning and walk around in the daylight”

“I like to recommend treatments that are already accessible and are low harm and low cost and light exposure. can therefore be weaved into your sleep regulation and your behavioral activation and your exercise”

“You need a dawn signal, something that simulates dawn. Well, those are commercially available. They are called dawn simulators”

“Not everybody has to buy a dawn simulator. If your sleep rhythm currently is somewhere around 10 to 6 because you've been getting up on a regular basis, then maybe the dawn signal that you get out of your light that's leaking through your windows”

“So we do this in really small steps. It's going to take a while. And if you rush it, it'll be harder. If you move it slowly, it will be easier and eventually you'll get there. So 15 minute increments, say 15 minute steps, move your Dawn Simulator to 15 minutes earlier”

“there is one variable, one Zeitgeber, one time giver that sets our circadian rhythm more powerfully than the rest. And that one is light, the appearance of light in the morning and the disappearance of light in the evening”

“So we're talking about a larger effect, a big effect for this one. And is it addressing a deficit model? That was the whole point of seasonal depression is there's a deficit of morning light. So you have to give this in the morning, not the afternoon”

“people who live in an indoor environment lit with fluorescent lights, as people do where they work in an office, they're just not getting enough light during the day”

“that's about a thousand lux, particularly in an office building, for example, or like a hospital, about a thousand lux. Well, outdoors at the same time, like 10 a.m., 12 or midday, it's 10,000 lux on a gray day. On a blue day, it's 100,000 lux”

“the Dawn Simulator has been used in multiple randomized trials and shown to be better than interesting placebo arrangements for the treatment of seasonal affective disorders”

“And lo and behold, from the get-go of being awake, like time zero, when people first wake up and start doing their alertness checklist, as soon as they wake up, The people who had a Dawn simulator had a higher alertness score from the get-go”

“A full-on light box at 18 inches is Can induce a manic episode. It's just, it's an antidepressant. So light is a powerful tool”

“these are harmless. How many treatments do we have in psychiatry? And these are robust treatments as the research literature shows. How many treatments do we have that are this robust? They have no side effects or long-term risks”

“The only harm would be if your bed partner is not on the same schedule and might not appreciate having this thing go off and then they need a sleep mask and you can continue to do what you need to do”