The best SAD lamp is the one that works best for your specific treatment needs. Light therapy works best when it is properly attuned to your body and your lifestyle so that ultimately you are able to experience relief from the symptoms of a light deficiency.

A light box is a metal box whose basic components are a bulb and a diffuser. These are the elements that help to customize the type of light that you receive, its intensity, its brightness, even its spectrum and wavelength are important to your therapy. The box itself should be angled so that you may comfortable pursue other activities when using it. The strength of the light you are receiving should be around 10,000 lux so as to mimic full sunlight. Your diffuser should have a UV filter in order to protect your eyes during treatment. These are the basics.

One of the better types of light box is the full spectrum box. It has a full range of light, imitates the sun, and has a bluish cast. Another strong contender is the broad spectrum box which is similar, but doesn’t contain UV rays in its spectrum. If you need the light while traveling, you might consider a portable light box. Finally, there is the dawn simulator, which is a nice accompaniment to light therapy in its own right. Any of these models could be the right one for you so its best to carefully consider before picking your light box.

Light is one of the most important components of our physical and mental health. Without it, we simply cannot function correctly. Our bodies cannot maintain the production of vitamins, hormones, and other chemicals necessary for health and balance. The only light that can meet all these needs is full spectrum light. Normally, we would receive the proper amount of light to catalyze important chemical reactions via sunlight absorbed during the day. But human beings have moved to an indoor life, where the amount of light can be 500 to 1000 times less that what we’d get outside. We no longer govern our days by the light of the sun, but our bodies are still trying to and in the process, our quality of life suffers.

Sunlight stimulates our brains and help to regulate our hormonal systems. It stimulates our bodies and helps to allow nutrient absorption and vitamin D production. Its lack has been linked to SAD, clinical depression, sleep disorders, tooth decay, suppressed immune function, hair loss, sun damage, cancer, alcoholism, drug abuse, Alzheimer’s disease, and more.
Without sunlight the delicate system that allows us to keep running on a day-to-day basis is powerfully disrupted.  The importance of proper light exposure to our health and happiness simply cannot be overstated. Even in is purest form, evaluated only as energy; light is one of the most powerful components of life on earth. Like water and air, it is a basic key to life.

It used to be that jet lag was just another part of travel. We all expected to just deal with a disrupted sleep schedule and its side effects (irritability, poor concentration, general fogginess) at either end of a good trip. But recent research has shown that jet lag is not only an inconvenience, it’s a serious disruption of the body’s systems.

Jet lag or dysrhythmia occurs when you travel east to west across more than one time zone to reach your destination. Crossing time zones prevents the body from receiving regular signals about the time of day from events like sunrise and sunset. This disrupts the body clock and can affect more than fifty physiological and psychological rhythms. Studies have shown that jet lag can cause memory loss and potential shrinkage within the brain. It has a negative effect on blood pressure. It can leave you unable to sleep, unable to concentrate, and even depressed.

Without treatment, jet lag recovery takes at least a day per time zone at each end of your trip. It might even take up to three weeks to adjust and the older you are the worse the effects get. Fortunately, research demonstrates that the cure is as simple as the cause. By treating yourself with la light box in the morning (when traveling east) or in the evening (when traveling west) you can simulate the light events that you would otherwise miss and help keep your natural clock on track.

As light therapy continues to be studied, researchers are finding that our sensitivity to the timing, intensity, and even the amount of light we receive is leading to an ever expanding number of medical uses for light therapy. Light therapy is the leading treatment for SAD, but scientists are exploring its use with everything from jet lag to skin disorders and even Parkinson’s disease.

For years we’ve known that sunlight improves acne. Now we know that it does that by triggering a chemical reaction in the bacteria that causes it, destroying them. Light therapy can trigger other chemical reactions, too. It is being used to break down the compounds that cause neonatal jaundice and to suppress the immune system while treating skin diseases like Psoriasis and Eczema.

More common uses for light therapy are related to sleep and depression. Knowing its effect on SAD, scientists have been working with light therapy to treat delayed sleep phase syndrome, advanced phase sleep syndrome, and non 24 hour sleep wake syndrome. These treatments are about the timing of the therapy and keep circadian rhythms accurate. Similar tests have been done with jet lag and shift work. Even Parkinson’s tremors can be reduced by the application of light. The therapy is proving to be a valuable treatment in many different medical arenas as scientists explore the natural effects of our body’s response to sunlight and disease. Shining a light on disease really does seem to work.