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Bright light lamps can help manage depression year-round
Just half an hour a day can lift the mood of not only people with seasonal depression, but anyone who suffers from low mood.
Bright light therapy, a standard treatment for seasonal depression triggered by dark days in winter, can also help those who suffer from depression throughout the year.
In the new study, researchers reviewed data from 858 adults with nonseasonal depression taken from 11 clinical trials. Participants were randomly assigned to groups that received bright light therapy alone or in combination with antidepressants, or to control groups that received medication alone, placebo or dim red light therapy.
According to the results, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, those treated with bright light were more than twice as likely to experience a reduction in depressive symptoms or remission (return to a normal level of social functioning) compared to those who did not receive such therapy.
When the researchers studied treatments that lasted less than four weeks, people who received bright light therapy were three times more likely to improve symptoms or have remission of symptoms. When the treatment lasted more than a month, people using bright light were two to three times more likely to improve symptoms or have remission.
“Our results suggest that bright light treatment for one week can be as effective as treatment for six weeks,” said lead study author Artur Menegaz de Almeida of the Federal University of Mato Grosso in Brazil.
Bright light therapy usually lasted at least 30 minutes. The brightness of the light boxes used for treatment was 10,000 lux, which is about the same as outdoor lighting on a weather day.
One limitation of the new analysis is that small studies of bright light therapy varied in duration, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly how many weeks of treatment might be ideal, the study said. Another drawback is that the researchers were unable to distinguish between the effects of bright light therapy for bipolar disorder and other types of nonseasonal depression.
Bright light therapy can be more effective if you buy the right type of light box (also called a light therapy lamp) and use it correctly, says Raymond Lam, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved in this study. A good light box should provide at least 10,000 lux of illumination and be large enough to flood you with light if you’re sitting a few feet away from it and it’s on a table or pedestal.
You don’t have to look at the lamp. You can read, eat breakfast, or check your email, but you must be awake because the light will not work if you are sleeping or your eyes are closed.
Bright light therapy improves your mood best when you use it in the morning. This is the perfect time to synchronize with your circadian rhythm, or biological clock, and trigger chemicals in your brain that are thought to improve mood, says Lam.
“Bright light at noon has no effect,” Lum says. “It doesn’t matter how much light you get during the day. It matters how much bright light you get in the morning, and light therapy early in the morning is what you need to improve your mood for depression.”
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