Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression or winter blues, impacts many people living in northern climates such as Canada. For those who have been diagnosed with SAD, one of the treatments is light therapy. As someone who gets winter depression, I was the ideal candidate to test out Philips goLITE BLU.
Now this is not just your regular table lamp. SAD lamps, like the goLITE BLU, usually radiate 10,000 lux (‘lux’ being the measurement or intensity of light as perceived by humans). Your average household lamp puts out 100 lux. Office fluorescent light fixtures usually weigh in at 300 lux, so 10,000 is pretty bright – it’s about the equivalent of full daylight. Usually you sit with the lap aimed at your eyes from below (no, you don’t stare ¬atthe light) for a minimum of 20 minutes up to an hour.
In the past almost 20 years, I have used two different lamps. One is a huge box that blasts out 10,000 lux, the other is a small, portable one which pumps out about 5,000 lux. Unfortunately the big lamp wasn’t portable and looked like something from the Soviet era school of design. The smaller lamp was great at first but soon I found – despite what I was promised by the manufacturer – that this lamp was unable to last half a session without needing to be plugged in.
Philips goLITE BLU is a small unit measuring approximately 14 cm wide by 14 cm long and about 3.5 cm thick. It’s a cute, white unit you can easily hold in your hands. The blue light it pumps out is – so they claim – the most efficient kind of energizing light, requiring just 200 lux to achieve an effect similar to 10,000 lux of white light. We did an unofficial test and the brightness of the lamp certainly equalled that of a similar sized light, so on the surface it looked possible.
The unit has an hour detector on the bottom – one dash for every 10 minutes. The first time through it was nice to have it run the entire hour without needing a recharge. A red light appears on the bottom after 60 minutes, and doesn’t shut off.
As for how many charges it held and how long it took to recharge, the time for the light to run on battery seems to be an hour – so if you use it for 20 minutes or for 30, usually after the second day it needs a recharge. The nice thing about it is how quickly it charges: usually about an hour or less.
It’s difficult to say how effective it is. While I used it I didn’t notice a dip in my behaviour; I felt about the same as when I used my old SAD lamps. I do find the blue light much easier on the eyes, and the overall design much more flattering. I don’t like getting the winter blues... but with this chic little unit I get a pleasant kind of blue that takes the edge off.
