This could be the best winter ever. Light therapy is a safe, effective way to combat winter depression. All you may need to do to be your normal, happy self is spend some time outside every day. Switching to full spectrum lights in your house and office can also help improve your mood and increase productivity. If more serious steps are required, bright light therapy can often help relieve winter depression in as little as 30 minutes a day. 1. Get out in the sunshine every day. The easiest way to apply light therapy is to create a daily routine that involves spending time outside on sunny days. Taking a walk, going snowshoeing, or just sitting in front of a window with a sunny southern exposure is often enough to relieve winter depression. The key is to be consistent and make time for sunlight every day. In some northern areas, the days are too short and the sunlight does not have enough intensity for this simple method to be beneficial. On the same note, winter weather often has a few days of sunshine with long stretches of gray clouds, and rain or snow. 2. Change your home and office lights to bright, full spectrum lighting. A second method of using light therapy to help alleviate mild winter depression is to change all of your indoor lights to brighter intensity, full spectrum lighting. Within the past year several light bulb manufacturers,such as GE, Westinghouse, and …show more content…
The disorder is often characterized loss of pleasure in normal activities, a depressed felling for most of the day, appetite or weight disturbance, sleep disturbances, abnormal fatigue or loss of energy, abnormal self-reproach, abnormal morbid thoughts of death, that are not due to a physiological condition, a mood incongruent psychosis, normal bereavement, and the person being diagnosed with depression must never have experienced a manic episode. For a diagnosis of clinical depression to be made, five of the positive symptoms must be present while none of the according to www.mentalhealth.com It is no surprise that depression leads to poor health. A study conducted by the World Health Organization shows that not only does depression lead to poor health, but the condition can be more disabling than angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes. Adding to the problem is that depression tends to affect people with chronic conditions worse than those who just suffer from depression alone. A study that included more than 245,000 participants asked the people taking part questions about their health, how well they sleep, how much pain they have and whether or not they suffer from problems involving memory or concentration. When other factors such as poverty and other physical ailments found that depression lead to the worst health conditions among the participants. The fact that depression leads to poor health is not new, but the