What Affect Can The Amount Of Light In The Morning Have On My Mood For The Day?
A common question is whether the amount of light in the morning can affect the mood of a person for the day? The logical and truthful answer is “Yes, it can”. “Winter blues” is a common enough term and refers to the constant low energy one experiences during the course of a day, in the cold weather. Feeling depressed, low energy, overweight, and literally forcing yourself out of bed in the mornings throughout the short days of winters can be extremely taxing.
This condition is generally termed as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the SAD syndrome, which occurs due to the lack of exposure to light. When you wake up in the early hours of the morning, it is still dark outside that gives you a general feeling of gloominess, lingering on for the whole day, if not exposed to enough light. This happens mostly in winters, because days are shorter, and when your day starts, it is still dark at that time, which leaves its affects on you.
Why do we feel happy when the day is sunny? It is the noise of the birds in the morning, and the sound of the daily hustle and bustle of everyone, rushing to their destinations, that make the day a whole lot cheerful. Complains of having trouble in getting out of the bed in the morning is comparatively less in summers.
Actual medical studies done on the subject of “light effecting the mood of a person” shows that everyone, whether regularly afflicted with SAD or not, reacts to an increase or decrease in the intensity of light, during the course of a day. More light leads to a better mood and less to a lazy rather depressive one.
Normally, days in winters start when it is still dark and damp outside; in the same weather, you get ready, and go to your office/college/school. Once out, you normally wait for the lunch break to go out and have something to eat; this is one time when you have the chance of some exposure to the sunlight, but it usually happens that you get so busy in work that the time for the lunch break ends. Therefore, when you finally get free and are set to get back to home, it is already dark again. With such a routine, you hardly get any proper exposure to the daylight; you actually miss it.
There is always a remedy for every problem. There are a few suggestions for it in order to deal with these winter blues. Take a light therapy to lift up your mood and put the gloom away. Use a full spectrum light therapy at the start of the day, as a substitute to the natural sunlight. This light therapy has been widely used for treating the SAD syndrome.
Light boxes and visors are also helpful along with body clocks – these work by using the natural reaction of your body towards sunrise, and sunset, in order to help synchronise your awake/sleep routine. Every morning, the light comes on very gradually, just like a normal sunrise, so that your body responds to the slowly increasing amount of light around you, subconsciously.
The options mentioned above can be very expensive for some people, so you can use more lamps and tube lights to brighten up your surroundings. Another thing that can be done is to keep one or two lights on before going to bed. The idea behind this is to provide exposure to you to more light that you miss during the day.
Rosana Horowitz is an health expert. She is helping people in getting out of depression and she has recommended many products like lumie to get-up on time. You can use it for time management. For more details visit http://www.bodykind.com.
