Carex Day-Light Classic Plus Light Therapy Lamp

Fall is here again. Which means pumpkin spice lattes, and apple picking, and unfortunately, seasonal affective disorder. If you happen to suffer from SAD, you've probably heard the suggestion to get one of these SAD lamps. But do they work? (keyboard clicking) (mouse clicking) (gentle piano music) Hi, Jamie. Hi Dorie, good to meet you. I'm an Associate Professor at Stanford University and a staff scientist at the VA hospital. And I've been studying the impact of light on human brain and behavior for about 20 years. Do people call it S-A-D or just SAD? Both.- Both. Okay. It feels really silly to be like, have you experienced SAD? I experience happy, I experience sad. Yes. Yeah, I experience all of it all the time and it's overwhelming. Can you tell us what exactly is seasonal affective disorder, or SAD? Seasonal affective disorder as opposed to standard depression is linked to obviously, the seasons. And so this is something that you would expect to see more often in individuals who are living in the Northern climes, where you're going to have longer nights in the winter time. So in the summertime, people are fine. In the wintertime, they become more depressed. We think that the circadian system's involved, the circadian system helps keep track of things like night length. There's not like there's only one cause for this, some of it's going to be in ability to get outside. Some people can definitely be more depressed when that happens. On someone it's going to be directly biological, just that you're getting less light during the daytime. Is it something you've also dealt with personally? Have you ever experienced SAD? I have not. Lots of other issues, but not SAD. (laughs) Yeah, same. I do have one, and like, super bright, but what is it about the brightness that makes you experience less SAD? One of the theories is that you're basically shortening your brain's perception of the night length. So if we were living without electricity, you would have a perception of night length based on when the sun rose and when the sun went down. The idea here is that you're basically pushing back to an earlier time when the sun is coming up. And so to the brain, it feels like those nights are getting shorter. So if you're getting up at say 7:00 AM, and it's still dark out, but you turn this lamp on and you get a big dose of light, then that's when the brain is going to think that the night has ended. Do SAD lamps actually work? What is the research on that indicating at this point? The lamps can definitely work. One of the biggest problems with the lamps is compliance. Do you use them? Frankly, going outside is better, if you can do it. But if you're in Wisconsin and it's January, this might not be so easy to do. Some of them are, you know, huge. And it's not a giant apartment, and so it involves moving it back and forth. And depression is an ouroboros, like the more depressed you are, the less likely you are to do the thing that will help you be less depressed, so it's just like. Before somebody decides to buy a SAD lamp, what should they consider? Are there certain qualities that they should be looking for in a SAD lamp? I think the first thing you need to do is make sure that what you have is SAD. You really want to go see a doctor, make sure this is what you have, and have them give a formal recommendation for what you should be doing. These things can work. It's just a question of convenience and comfort. If people like it, will people use it? And that's really the biggest issue with these devices. Especially 1 on a daily basis, and for long enough. Typically people say, well, you know, it's 30 minutes, but will you do that every day? Or do you start to kind of cheat? You turn the light on, you sit there, but then you don't look at it because it's bright and annoying. It's bright. You really looking for something that is going to fit in with your lifestyle, your decor, your demeanor. This lamp is our top pick, the Carex Day-Light Classic Plus. Unfortunately when it shipped, it showed up with a little bit of damage, and that's just show biz baby. 2 Luckily we also have this model by Carex, which basically functions the same way, and we'll be using it for the sake of this video. It's important to know that obviously we can't test these SAD lamps for how effective they are at actually combating seasonal affective disorder. So when we tested these, we were mostly assessing durability, comparing prices, and making sure that they lived up to specs. Both of them have a really easy on and off switch. Both of them hinge super easily from the base. And both of them were super durable. Usually. This really is a fluke. It's a great model, besides the day that you need it for a video. Could you just talk about how somebody would use a SAD lamp? Typical recommendations are going to be to get a half hour of light. So it's a question of how can you position the light so that it doesn't have a lot of glare, so that it doesn't have this kind of annoying aspect to it. And so if you can have a window behind it, even if it's still kind of dark outside, it's gonna be brighter usually than what's inside the room. Usually people have it about three feet away, again, it doesn't have to be straight on into the eyes. It can be at an angle, but it needs to be bright. Jamie, do you have any other suggestions for people suffering from SAD? One of these lamps is low-hanging fruit. This is not taking a drug. It's not going to have a lot of side effects. Not a big investment. And if it gets rid of depression for multiple months of the year, that's fantastic. If you were super wealthy, you could spend your summers in Denmark, and then your winters somewhere warm, like Los Angeles for example. If you're that wealthy you could pay someone else to have your SAD. That's so true. (laughs) Hi. I hope you had a happy experience watching this video about SAD lamps. If you like, what you saw, feel free to like comment and subscribe. Thanks.

The days are getting shorter  it's colder and darker outside How many of you all are feeling  a little bit more depressed ? In this episode I'm going to teach you how  light impacts your brain and influences your mood and I'm also going to teach you  how you can use light therapy as a natural , non-medicinal way to treat seasonal depression  which is also known as winter blues or SAD and how rigorous research has shown that light therapy  can be as effective as antidepressant medication at treating non-seasonal depression. Oh and if  you'd like to learn more natural research-backed ways to treat depression and anxiety check out  my online course Change Your Brain: 10 natural research-backed ways to treat depression and  anxiety the course link is in the description. this video is sponsored by Carex, Carex makes  quality natural light lamps that are used by medical professionals and these mimic natural  sunlight to improve mood enhance sleep schedules and treat depression so go to carex.com and  use the discount code Nutshell20 to get 20% off your purchase in my 20s I spent a couple of  years working in wilderness and adventure therapy programs with troubled teenagers and as staff  our shifts were eight days on six days off so during our shift we lived outside in simple tarp  shelters and over time we noticed that our bodies started to adapt to outdoor living so for example  because we didn't shower very often our scalps just naturally started to produce less grease  or after being in the wilderness for a while we'd start to smell like dirt and we'd notice  that the bugs didn't go for us as much or another example is when we'd show up for our first day on  shift out in the desert the temperatures were over 100 degrees it would just seem unbearable  but within a few days of living out there our bodies would adapt and the heat didn't bother  us so much anymore and I personally noticed that during the hot summer months I had a lot less  of an appetite and in the cold winter months when I needed to burn calories to heat myself  I naturally had a much bigger appetite but one of the biggest changes that I noticed while I was  living in the wilderness was that my body started to naturally sink to the cycles of light outside  so in the summer during the long bright days I didn't need as much sleep I would only sleep six  or seven hours but I would still wake up in the morning just like full of energy and I couldn't  stay in my sleeping bag any longer than that and in the winter months we would still camp  outside in these simple tarp shelters even if there was a couple feet of snow on the ground  and my body naturally adapted to that as well so your body cranks out more heat in the winter  and naturally I had a little bit less energy and I was able to stay warm and stay wrapped up in my  sleeping bag during those long winter nights and I was probably sleeping 11 or 12 hours a night and I  was able to spend like 13 hours in my sleeping bag now during the summer that would have driven me  crazy spending that much time just laying around so despite all the other factors that may  have been present it was clear to me that light was having an impact on my day-to-day  work and my energy levels in the wilderness research shows that the light that enters  our eyes gives information to our brain as to what our energy level should be light sets our  body's clock which is called the circadian rhythm and changes in light levels can affect hormones  like melatonin and serotonin so sunlight cues these special areas of our retinas this triggers  the brain to release serotonin and serotonin is a neurotransmitter associated with happiness  serotonin also impacts sexual functioning sleep memory learning digestion and other functions  throughout the body decreased sun exposure is connected to a drop in serotonin levels and this  can lead to depression with a seasonal pattern you may be familiar with serotonin because some of  the most commonly used antidepressant medications like prozac these work by impacting serotonin but  you can also trigger the release of serotonin by increasing your exposure to daylight or bright  lights another hormone melatonin this is a key to our body's sleep-wake cycle our bodies respond  to darkness by producing melatonin which signals the body to prepare for sleep when we're exposed  to sunlight in the morning melatonin is produced sooner and it helps us sleep more easily come  night time regular sunlight exposure during the day is essential for a synchronized melatonin  production and a healthy sleep and wake schedule and this is really important because sleep  problems are directly linked to depression when we can improve sleep research shows it can  improve depression symptoms 87 percent of the time light impacts our body in other ways too the sun's  uv rays have been linked to vitamin d production lower blood pressure and research shows that  people generally have lower mood and less energy on cloudy days than they do on sunny ones  and this isn't like a brain defect or something it's a trait that's helped our ancestors survive  so historically our ancestors almost all worked outdoors on cold wet or dark days it was more  efficient for them to stay indoors and to stay warm and to conserve energy and the bright hot  sunny days it was better for them to get outside and be hunting or farming or whatever it was that  they needed to do so if you look at the symptoms of seasonal depression these are things like low  energy sleeping longer eating more these could be really adaptive if you were stuck inside a hut all  winter and it was best if you just spent more time sleeping than being stuck inside full of energy  our brain has evolved to adapt to our natural environment and it's not adapted very well to our  modern environment our modern society expects us to work a nine-to-five schedule regardless  of the season the temperature or the weather and according to the epa Americans spend 90 of  their time indoors and our brain just hasn't adapted very well to this artificial indoor light  is not nearly as beneficial to our brains and our bodies as natural sunlight so this sets us up to  be more irritable depressed or feel low energy because our body is out of sync with our work  environment and this can lead to depression so one way to improve your mood is to start by increasing  your access to natural sunlight throughout the day but especially in the morning within the first  hour of waking up even diffuse light coming in through the windows can be beneficial so open your  windows natural sunlight is powerful and a recent study showed that spending a weekend camping in  the winter can even reset your natural body clock and resolve those seasonal issues like low energy  but the thing is most of us just aren't able to hibernate during the winter or get enough sunlight  to have regular energy and a positive mood so when natural light isn't an option  it's possible to do light therapy at home so light therapy has been shown through rigorous  research to be helpful with seasonal affective disorder and also non-seasonal depression I mean  just regular old depression so multiple large careful studies using control groups these are the  best kind of studies have shown that light therapy is as effective at treating non-seasonal  depression as antidepressant medications and light therapy shows even more success in treating  depression when it's combined with antidepressant medication light therapy has been shown to  be effective with low energy sleep problems changes in sleep schedules like having jet lag or  shift work and emerging research is showing that light therapy has possible promising effects for  depression in schizophrenia borderline personality disorder parkinson's and fibromyalgia and some  very small studies have shown that light therapy can be helpful at rapidly treating depression in  bipolar disorder now I think ideally we would all spend a lot more time outdoors and have the  opportunity to hibernate during the winter or at least go camping but since that's not  realistic for most of us using a therapy light can be the easiest way to help boost your  mood so let's talk about how to do light therapy light therapy can be used with medication  and it has very few risks or side effects now of course I recommend talking with your doctor  about your specific situation before using light therapy but the first thing to know when beginning  light therapy is that not just any light will work so as I mentioned at the beginning of this  video this this episode is sponsored by Carex and just so you know I turn down a lot of sponsors  that don't meet the standards of rigorous research I won't promote something that I don't believe is  safe or effective and Carex makes very nice lights that carefully meet all the cet  guidelines so in addition to sponsoring this video they've also given me  some of their lights to donate to my clients so what you need is a light box that can actually  project 10 000 lux at a comfortable distance so you don't have to have your face like right  up against the light box and the other important things are that this light should emit no uv  rays and it should use a white light spectrum so this lamp here is the daylight classic and  it uses a uv filter to make sure that no uv uh comes through now the other light that I was  sent by Carex it uses bulbs that don't have any uv in them they use uv-free technology now the  lamp should have the ability to mimic the sun by entering your eyes from a downward angle so  it needs to be able to be propped up in some way and it should have a very large lit surface area  and not a single point of light so if you look at this light box it's quite large right and this  makes it a lot easier for you to get the needed therapeutic dose in less amount of time so with  the 10 000 lux light box light therapy usually involves daily sessions of around 20 to 30 minutes  and you can just sit or work near a light box and the light needs to enter your eyes indirectly so  you need to have your eyes open you can set it on your table or your desk at home and that way  you can read or you know do some other activity while having your light therapy you can't get  the same effect by just exposing your skin to the light so you do need to have your eyes open you  can't just lay in bed while you do light therapy the other thing is you don't want to like stare  directly into the light box that can be a little hard on the eyes and if you're going to choose to  do light therapy i recommend you using a tracker and carex.com has a cool little uh tracker  where you can track your mood and track your light therapy use and that way you can be really  consistent because to see results you need to put in a consistent amount of time every day for  most people light therapy is most effective when it's done early in the morning right after you  wake up and you want to have this box about 16 to 24 inches from your face now light therapy has  very few risks but using artificial light boxes can trigger irritability or even mania so if you  have bipolar disorder or a manic disorder or if you've had manic episodes in the past you'll just  want to be very cautious about using light therapy maybe start with smaller doses or shorter amounts  of time and you know of course work with your doctor to figure out if it's a good option for  you the only other precautions are if you have really sensitive skin or really sensitive eyes you  might want to talk with your doctor first and some medications including some antidepressants and  st john's wort they can make your skin and your eyes more sensitive to light so I recommend  you talk with your doctor about that too now just in case you were wondering tanning beds are  not a good alternative they release a different wavelength of light and they can increase skin  cancer risk just like exposure to sunlight does so most people don't know that there are  many natural options to treat depression and many doctors aren't even aware of the benefits  of light therapy their first go-to treatment is often recommending an antidepressant medication  and antidepressants are a really valid form of treatment they've got a lot of good research  behind them but they do come with side effects and one of the best things about light therapy in  my opinion is that it has very few side effects and research shows that it's also a effective way  to treat seasonal and non-seasonal depression so if you think that this might be a good option for  you talk with your doctor and check out the link in the description to buy a therapy light I hope  you found the information in this episode helpful please share this video with someone you think  could benefit from light therapy and if you haven't already please like and subscribe  to help others find these videos take care.

Hey everybody, it's Doctor Jo, and this video's so bright, I gotta wear shades. But seriously, today I'm gonna talk about light therapy. So let's get started. So a lot of you have asked me about light therapy, so I wanted to talk about it. Does it help? Is it really beneficial? Is it worth trying? Well, especially now when people are working more from home, when people are eLearning, they're not getting outside as much, research does show that light therapy really can help. And the reason for that is especially in the fall and the winter, you're, if you're not getting as much sunlight coming in, you're not going outside because it's cold, you really need that natural light to kind of help reset your body, energize your body, keeping everything and your circadian rhythm like stuff working properly. So one of the biggest things that research shows that the light therapy helps with is something that's called SAD. Which is seasonal affective disorder. So just kind of like I said, when it becomes fall and winter, we often don't get out as much. And also the sun's not a bright, and it doesn't have as much, what we call lux, or the amount of light that comes in. So trying light therapy can really help mimic maybe that sunlight that you're not getting. It can also help kind of get your sleep on track. Or if you have something like jet lag. Or even if you work at night, instead of in the day, and you're trying to get that rhythm fixed a little bit, using light therapy can be very, very beneficial. So now that I've talked it about it a little bit, you might be wondering what this thing is over here. So this is the Carex Daylight Classic Plus Light Therapy Lamp. And so this one is nice. I like it as an option just because it has the 10,000 lux, which is what the light amount they recommend to get that natural kind of daylight. And this one has that and it has two different settings. So if you want to start it off a little bit lower, that's great. And then you can build it up. It also has an adjustable head here. So you can bend it down and up to angle it because most of the time with the light, what you want to do is, you want to have it not super close, but fairly close enough where you can have it slightly above you at an angle kind of like it's reproducing the sunlight coming in. You can also adjust the height a little bit. Going down and up if you want. So I don't want to blind you, but I'm gonna turn on the light now. So this is the lower setting. And I would always maybe recommend starting off with the lower one and bringing it up, and that's pushing it down. And then you come up with the brighter one. So it's usually recommended for light therapy in general that you want to start off with about 20-30 minutes a day. And a lot of the research recommends doing it in the morning when you first wake up to kind of help get you energized and everything like that. But the biggest thing with light therapy in general is you really have to be consistent with it. This is not something that you're gonna turn it on once and feel immediately better. You have to be consistent. You have to do, you know it every day the amount of time for it to really hopefully help those symptoms. It's not gonna work for everybody, but it's definitely something that is worth trying if you have these symptoms. Like again if you have seasonal depression, even if you have some other types of depression. Make sure you talk with your doctor, make sure this is something that is appropriate for you. Even things like jet lag, I talked about, sleep disorders. Things just to kind of help you get moving again. Even in some research shows it helps with dementia, just kind of resetting that brain to get that natural light. But it's also important to note that even though there's very little side effects because it is just a natural light therapy. That sometimes there are some side effects. People might report a jittery feeling, so slightly you know irritable, or maybe headaches. And there's some other ones, so that's why it's always important to talk with your doctor before you want to try something like this. Especially if you've been diagnosed with these specific things. So if you're interested in purchasing the product, make sure and click on the link up there. And don't forget to subscribe by clicking down there.And remember, be safe, have fun, and I hope you feel better soon.

Hey it's karina your virtual health coach and today i'm excited to tell you about this carex bright light therapy lamp so if you've ever noticed that sometimes during the winter months you start to feel a little meh and a little bleh well a lot of times that can actually be because we're not getting enough sunlight so this bright light therapy is designed to give you a significant amount of light that will actually trigger your body to create serotonin which is a precursor to melatonin and that's the hormone that helps us fall asleep so especially if you're somebody who doesn't get a lot of time outside in the sun or maybe you're just indoors at work through most of the sunny hours of the day using this bright light therapy can really help to reduce the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder general anxiety or just feeling a little down in the dumps so this is the carex daylight classic plus so it just sets up on your desk it does have this adjustable height setting and you can even change the angle of the light because that's going to influence the effectiveness so i'm just going to show you for a second how bright this light is so a lot of times the light that we're getting indoors is just so significantly lower in terms of the locks or amount of light coming out it doesn't stimulate the body to produce serotonin and melatonin and in this way if we're just spending all our time indoors and not getting any of that super bright outdoor light it can kind of turn our circadian rhythm towards difficulty falling asleep or maybe just not feeling super rested when we do wake up so everything from our energy levels our mood and even our appetite can all be affected if our body is not producing the melatonin and serotonin that it needs so the amount of light coming out of this lamp is going to help stimulate some of that serotonin production and it just turns off super easily as well so we're recommended to start with about 20 to 30 minutes per day of getting this light exposure you can do it in the morning the afternoon or the evening and different people will kind of have different responses to the light or how much it helps improve their sleep depending on what time of day you use it so i really like having the light on in the morning i'm just always trying to plan out my day gather my thoughts maybe do some journaling or something like that so i've been using the daylight classic plus in the mornings and i'm definitely feeling like it's helping me get better sleep so you may have also heard that blue light can also take away from our body's ability to get good sleep it's because blue light also suppresses the production of melatonin that helps us sleep so bright light therapy is not the same as blue light and using a bright light therapy like this can help to counteract some of those negative impacts of the blue light exposure that we get from computers cell phones and other electronic devices thank you so much for joining me today for this video i really hope that you will chime in down below if you've ever used a product like this and let me know if it helped you or if you have any questions or requests for my future videos you can chime in with those as well i hope that you're having a wonderful wonderful day and i look forward to seeing you again soon i want to thank caraps for sponsoring this video and sending me this amazing bright light therapy i look forward to seeing you guys in the very next video and hope you have a wonderful day you can save 20 on your order today with our coupon code or just click the link in the description below