The good news for SAD sufferers is that symptoms often appear in regular cycles in relation to the season, weather, or work schedule.  If your symptoms are related to the season’s natural shift towards shorter days, than there are several things you can do to help symptoms from appearing.  You can also be proactive if you just switched to the graveyard shift, started a new job in an office with no window, or are beginning to feel the blues because of lack of sun.

The best thing to do is make yourself a priority and avoid stressful situations.  Since this is not always going to be possible, use exercise to help relieve stress.  Choose an exercise program that involves some outdoor activities like walking, hiking, or jogging if the weather permits.  If the weather is too bad for outdoor exercise, take it inside.  Join a gym or get DVDs to workout to at home.  Find a friend to be your exercise buddy to help you stay motivated.

Eating a healthy diet including fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats from fish like salmon can help balance mood.  Avoid eating high-carbohydrate comfort foods and sweets.  Also, avoid drinking alcohol as it is a depressant and will not help curb your symptoms.

Talk to your doctor about light therapy.  Starting light therapy at home before your symptoms get debilitating can help you stick to your other healthy habits.

In today’s modern world, many of us spend time indoors in artificial lighting.  Whether it’s at the office or at home, if you don’t get enough sunlight on your eyes you may have SAD symptoms even in the middle of the sunbelt in summer.  Graveyard shift workers are also susceptible to SAD year-round as they sleep during sunlight hours.

There are also some people that are believed to not process sunlight the same way as everyone else.  Sunlight helps the body produce hormones that regulate sleep.  Whether you are not getting enough sunlight because of the season, weather, or something in your body, you can suffer SAD symptoms because of it.
Since light therapy is drug-free, inexpensive, and has few side effects many people may want to try this out before resorting to drugs.  Make sure you talk to your doctor and ask her how to best use light therapy in your case.  Your doctor will be able to recommend an increasing dose that is appropriate for your situation and measure if the treatments are working.  Many patients feel relief in a week or less.

Before drugs became the popular treatment for depression, doctors would often advise people to go south for the winter or take a sunny vacation when they were feeling down.  This not only helped remove people from stress, it got them to bathe in sunlight and refresh their body’s need for sunlight.  Today, you can create your own sunny vacation at home.

There are several forms of depression and the symptoms can be similar.  In most people that are depressed symptoms include difficulty sleeping, a hard time getting out of bed, change in appetite, deflated mood, weight gain, and poor self esteem.  Sometimes, depression can be triggered by an event like a death, job loss, or giving birth.  If someone is already depressed, SAD can worsen symptoms.

If symptoms are left untreated, they generally worsen over time.  When someone is truly depressed, it rarely goes away without some sort of treatment.  Non-drug treatments may include exercise and a healthy diet, but when someone is depressed, it is hard to motivate and stick to healthy habits.
If you are a known SAD sufferer and you can tell that you are about to enter a cycle due to the time of year, take your mental health seriously.  If you have been depressed or experienced an event that would make anyone depressed than seek help right away.  SAD will make the other symptoms worse and traditional SAD therapies may not be enough to cure other forms of depression.  While light therapy works great for most SAD symptoms, it may not work if you are already depressed.  See you doctor at the beginning of your SAD cycle and ask them to evaluate you.  Tell him if you have been experiencing symptoms unrelated to the season.

If you want to get rid of your wrinkles, you might be able to use light therapy. In the past, people tried using LED light to remove wrinkles, but it only caused skin damage, instead. However, a German study has shown that LED light can be combined with a special kind of green tea extract to reduce wrinkles without doing any damage to skin. It was a small study with only one volunteer, but there was a definite difference in the quality of that person’s skin after one month of the therapy. That could pave the way for better treatments in the future and could help people who want to improve their appearance and look younger. It could eliminate some of the perceived need for Botox and cosmetic surgery, as well.

This treatment is still not widely available, but it does show that there are options becoming available for treating wrinkles and that those options might be safer than some of the choices that people have had in the past. That doesn’t mean that Botox or cosmetic surgery shouldn’t be used, but only that some people can have their wrinkles treated in less invasive ways that don’t pose any danger to them. That can help to reduce risks and reduce costs, both of which are good options for a lot of people who want to look younger and feel better about themselves.