![]() ![]() Nevertheless, I do everything required of me between 7-8am by Sad lamplight and get a mild headache, though this might be down to worrying whether I’m prioritising Lumie time enough. The other key time to use a lightbox is in the morning, although I wake annoyingly early, no matter the season. I celebrate by watching two more episodes, then fret that I’ve luxed my eyeballs too close to bedtime and won’t be able to sleep. This feels like cheating but later, when my son is in bed and I’m lying on the sofa watching Great British Menu, I do feel more alert. I decide to remove the diffuser, intensifying the light to 2,500 lux and reducing the recommended therapy time from an hour to 30 minutes. And I work from home, alone, and have a three-year-old. Also I’m in Scotland, where darkness falls earlier, heavier and grimmer than down south. Aside from yawning and standing on little die-cast cars, I tend to get little done in the blue period when late afternoon slumps into early evening. The lamp’s instruction booklet suggests I sit down, read, watch TV, or do some crafting while enjoying some teatime bright-light therapy, but if I could sit down and read I wouldn’t be sad and tired.īright-light therapy claims to make you feel more energised, alert, and to improve your mood. This is gloomy hour, in the same indisputable way that 6pm is happy hour. The Lumie’s broad head spotlights the pizza I’m about to put in the oven for my son, making the cheese glow an autumnal orange. It’s 4.30pm and I’m under the Sad lamp again. ‘It feels more like a pet than a remedy’. Rather than staring at a lightbox, I’ll be getting outdoors whenever it’s bright and dry, and embracing festivals, roaring fires, and feasts. Despite this, the ritual of using the light convinced me that it’s worth trying to mitigate the effects of colder, darker days. Even looking at it while it was switched off nearly brought on a migraine. It had no discernible effect except for reducing my risk of napping to zero, which I appreciated.Ī week into my one-woman trial, the tablet felt like an albatross in my life – a dead, grey albatross. I used it at the more reasonable distance of 12 inches and squeezed in the two hours of light exposure in between other activities. Perhaps part of its therapeutic effect is this enforced period of complete immobility, or the flood of relief when you eventually stop waterboarding your eyes with photons. The instructions recommend two hours of exposure each morning, held at six inches from the face. The tablet emits a very bright, blue-white fluorescent light that delivers the optical equivalent of a freezing cold shower. The grey, clunky tablet looked like something you might find suspended over an amateur basement mushroom laboratory, or perhaps an unconvincing medical prop on a TV show. I was let down by the unromantic appearance of the therapy light. Still, I was hopeful that mine would be a beautiful object, smooth and luminescent like an alien’s egg. ![]() A Sad lamp sounds a bit like the naughty step – a joyless place where you sit and think about what you’ve done. ![]()
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