Exercise is an important part of dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Light therapy without the addition of exercise is not as effective as the two in unison. Exercise by it’s nature gets your body warmed up, more awake and alert, it gets the bodily fluids moving and has a brightening affect. Individuals that suffer from SAD generally are rather sedentary because of the affliction or in general and may need some prompting by friends and family to get up and get out and get some exercise.

If you have a friend that you suspect has this affliction, you will do them some good by getting them out and moving. Maybe going for a walk, going to the mall, going on an adventure. Something like horseback riding would be a wonderful experience not only because of the interaction with a gentle, animal, but also the natural movement of a horse exercises the muscles of the body in a very low impact manner. Anything to get their thought and body processes into a higher gear. With their body more in motion, they will better be able to ward off the feelings of depression and despair related to the affliction. That, coupled with consistent doses of light therapy will help your friend or family member ward off the emotionally crippling affects of seasonal affective disorder.

If you’re happy, energetic and maybe somewhat over the top during the summer and transition to sad, depressed, have a lack of energy, your dietary habits change, your interaction with people changes, you may be suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The ability to diagnose this condition is only about fifteen years old though the condition itself has been around much longer.

Many people suffering from this disorder have a whole change of outlook on life between the winter and summer months, often contemplating suicide during the worst months of the affliction. In the past, this has been diagnosed as clinical depression and has been dealt with by heavy doses of mood altering drugs, but this is no longer the case. It has been discovered that people suffering from this affliction can greatly be affected in a positive manner by multi spectrum lighting. This lighting can help take the place of what the sun would normally accomplish during the sunny summer months. This along with exercise can help alleviate the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder without the influx of heavy drugs into the individual’s system. Doctors are more and more prescribing light therapy over conventional drugs when it comes to suffers of this affliction and their success rate with this type of treatment is very promising. As technology marches forward, these lights continue to become better and better representatives of the sunlight they seek to imitate.

If you suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, you are not alone. Some days you can be just sitting at a window watching the clouds rolling slowly past dark grey sliding over a light grey background, feeling the dreariness of the sky outside slipping into your soul, coloring your whole being with the grey color of nothingness. This feeling of depression brought on by somber days is not uncommon and with study is becoming more and more understood. There is a way to deal with this overall sad feeling, you don’t need to feel the nothingness of depression brought on by long, slow dreary days.

In this case, there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it actually is a light and not a train. This light is made specifically for someone suffering from what you do. This is a multi spectrum light that is designed specifically to help alleviate the symptoms of this affliction. Rather than taking a dose of mood altering drugs, sufferers can spend some time under these full spectrum lights, reading a book or working on their computer or even watching TV and feel relief from their symptoms. This type of therapy coupled with an exercise program will help to make life much brighter in the future, no matter what season it is outside.

Light therapy is about resetting the body’s circadian rhythms. It works to trigger its responses to sunlight when there simply isn’t enough natural sunlight to trigger them normally. One way to trigger these responses in a natural manner is to use a dawn simulator. This is a device that works much like an alarm clock. The simulator is set to a specific time. When that time arrives it triggers a light that slowly grows in its intensity and mimics the sunrise. Our eyes respond to light even when we ourselves are asleep and so our brain registers and begins to respond to the false dawn as if it were real. This helps to shut down the body’s melatonin production in anticipation of the need to be awake and alert now that it is day.

Some dawn simulators also work in reverse and can be set to mimic a sunset. This is useful for further fine-tuning light therapy and for treating sleep disorders or even jet lag. Specific individuals respond to light therapy best at specific times of day and a sunset simulator may be more helpful to some than morning therapy. Used with a traditional light box, a dawn simulator is a strong aid to the treatment of SAD as well. Because light therapy is about mimicking natural light, the dawn simulator is an excellent extension to it.