I hope you own a light. If not, tell me when your birthday is, and I'll take up a collection. I have watched people of the SAD tribe down through the years try every solution under the sun, and they all help a little, but nothing helps as much as actually replacing the light you're not getting.
The other big one is Vitamin D by the metric buttload. But even that is not as good as the lights. Sabrina swears by hers.
I won't argue with this. I know I'm definitely a person who is way happier when I get out, am at least somewhat active, and see some amount of sunlight. I'm generally pretty miserable on cloudy weeks and fine on sunny ones (super obvious after working outside for so long), but I've never thought of trying a light... Last winter I tried vitamin D for the first time, but mostly for the sick repellent affects. Don't recall any helping affects on mood, but I might not have taken enough.
You'll want to do some poking around, but as I recall, the effective dose of D3 for helping with SAD was in the 5000-6000IU/day range. Your skin makes like 20,000IU if you're in the sun for half an hour, so you're not really going to overdose at that range; the US RDA is woefully low. persipone once said to me that the medical community really doesn't have any *good* idea what a "normal" level of vitamin D looks like, because it's been nearly a hundred years since anyone in this country has HAD normal levels.
And hey, it'll help keep flu away as well. That's why I do it. :-)
And the lights... yeah. Get Sabrina or Cat to show you theirs. They're kinda pricey, but everyone I know who's in the SAD camp swears by them once they get one.
I so agree about the rda and values being pitifully low. I hope I don't make people suffer through these but there's always a good chance you've heard my vitamin c rant.
I'm gonna look around for d values. I doubt I'll be able to do the lamp thing anytime soon unless a good teaching job decides to pop up.
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I hope you own a light. If not, tell me when your birthday is, and I'll take up a collection. I have watched people of the SAD tribe down through the years try every solution under the sun, and they all help a little, but nothing helps as much as actually replacing the light you're not getting.
The other big one is Vitamin D by the metric buttload. But even that is not as good as the lights. Sabrina swears by hers.
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::curious::
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And hey, it'll help keep flu away as well. That's why I do it. :-)
And the lights... yeah. Get Sabrina or Cat to show you theirs. They're kinda pricey, but everyone I know who's in the SAD camp swears by them once they get one.
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I'm gonna look around for d values. I doubt I'll be able to do the lamp thing anytime soon unless a good teaching job decides to pop up.
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