A Day Without Blue Light Therapy is a Day Without End

After some trial and error with light therapy, I've finally settled on a pattern of using blue light in the morning and my sun lamp in the afternoon.  It's done a lot for my delayed sleep phase.  Since starting the blue light in the morning, I've been waking up around 9 am and falling asleep around 1 am. 

Then, this morning, something came up.  I skipped the blue light.  For just one day.  How much can it matter, right?

You will notice that the time stamp on this message is 3:30 am.  I believe I've answered the question.

Phillips GoLite BLU, and How to Use It.

A few weeks ago, when I was particularly frustrated my life revolving around my sun lamp (oh I do crack myself up sometimes), my partner got me a Phillips GoLite BLU Plus.  It's battery rechargeable, has a clock and a timer ... generally more portable and convenient than my sunlamp.

The point: Follow the directions.  If you have trouble falling asleep at night, use it in the morning.  If you have trouble staying up at night, use it in the afternoon.
 
I decided to ignore the directions.  I figured that since my mood slumps between 4 and 8 pm, that's the time I should use the blue light.  It helped, insofar as it freed me up from my desk long enough to lift weights, do my SPCA shift, make dinner, that sort of thing. 

I now think that  using it in the afternoon was perhaps ... unwise.

Blue light is a tricky thing.  It can help with seasonal depression, but it's not necessarily a good thing for bipolar disorder (and whatever my disorder "really" is, it acts a lot like bipolar in some ways).  Folks with bipolar can be tipped into hypomania or mania if they get too much blue light.  For that matter, anyone using too much light therapy can experience headaches, nausea, and irritability.

And if you use it too late in the afternoon, you'll have trouble falling asleep.  Remember my delayed sleep phase?  Course you do.  I emphatically do not need help staying awake at night.

The upshot is that yesterday I used the damn thing for an hour in the morning.  This morning I woke up on my own at eight frakking thirty  Yeah.  8:30.  Me.

I had a bit of trouble falling asleep last night, but when I slept I slept well.  The sleep issue could well be due to the Adderall I took in the morning to alleviate my crazy mood.  I'm writing in front of it right now, so we'll see how it goes in the coming days.

I wrote yesterday about my mood lability over the past few weeks.  My pdoc and I had tried to address it with an Adderall booster in the afternoon -- it made my afternoon depression go away, but it also messed with my sleep.  Then I tried taking the Adderall booster in the morning.  It still helped, but not as much, and it still messed with my sleep.

Oh Yeah, My Mood Action Plan

My experience the other night made me remember that I'd created a Mood Action Plan back in the day.  I've printed it up and posted it above my desk/studio table.  I've already acted on some of them -- namely those that deal with my daily mood crashes:

• Troughs or crashes in mood between the times of 4 and 8 pm become more frequent
• Troughs or crashes in mood between the times of 4 and 8 pm become worse (tearfulness, paranoia about relationships, pessimism running to despair)
• Troughs or crashes in mood lengthen beyond the 4 to 8 pm range

All three of these symptoms are occurring, a fact to which I have alerted my pdoc (which was action number 1 on my Plan). We're trying an Adderall booster in the early afternoon, but it's proving to be problematic for my sleep if I don't get in some vigorous exercise during the day.  And I do mean "vigorous". It has to be weight training -- going for a run don't cut it.

Lamictal 300mgs: Nearing My Psychoversary

It was last year at this time that things started to get really bad.  I felt OK during the sunny days, had low energy during the cloudy days.  Once it hit 4 pm though ... then The Thoughts started coming.  They went something like this:

There's not enough light in the house.  There's not enough light in the universe! But if I turn on all the lights in the house, I can keep it from tipping into the darkness.  

So ... darkness somehow "weighs more" than light?  That doesn't make any sense; how can darkness "weigh" anything?  It doesn't; it just doesn't.  

On the other hand ... I the dark, cavernous maw in the other room is sort of bugging me. All right, I'll humor myself, I'll turn on every damn light in the house.

And then, as the weeks wore on:

My Pharmacoepia

Just for fun the other day, I decided to compile a list of all the medications I take.  Here they are in all their scary, scary glory.

Morning cocktail:

• Lamictal, 300 mgs (mood stabilizer)
• Vyvanse, 70 mgs (long-release amphetamine to treat ADD)
• Claritin, 10 mgs (anti-histamine)
• Nasacort, 2 puffs each nostril (corticosteroid to keep my sinuses and ears from inflaming)
• Singulair (leukotriene inhibitor to prevent asthma symptoms

Midday:

• Adderall, 5 mgs  (used as an amphetamine "booster" to treat late-afternoon mood slump)

Bedtime: 

• Ativan, 1.25 mgs.  

Monthly:

• My good and dear friend, the Nuvaring (birth control)

As Needed:

• Q-var (corticosteroid for wheezy asthma -- I pretty much have this for emergencies)
  
• Abuterol (corticosteroid for acute asthma attack -- I need this even less often than the Q-var)
• Phenlyephrine (decongestant that is MY BEST FRIEND, because I can't tolerate Sudafed; for the longest time there were no other decongestant options out there, but phenylephrine was released because you can't cook meth from it.  Thanks, crystal meth epidemic!)
• Advil (If you don't know what this is, you live under a rock and probably don't have internet anyway)
• Booze (for fun.)

My poor liver.  My poor, poor liver.

 

Lamictal! Adderall! Ativan! The Musical!

In yesterdays post I wrote about feeling tied to my sunlamp for most of the day.  This is particularly bad during the late afternoon during my usual 4pm to 8 pm slump.  It's seriously cramping my style.

I saw my pdoc recently, and he was concerned about the slump.  He wants to try other things before raising the dose of lamictal.  It which seems fair enough. 300 mgs of lamictal is as high as they usually go to treat mood disorders; 400 mgs and upwards puts you into anti-convulsant territory.

So his suggestion is to take 5 mgs of Adderall XR in the afternoon.  Great.  Another drug.  I wasn't already feeling like my pee could be sold as a street drug that "will really make you trip, man!  This stuff is primo!"

Hmmm.  Maybe there's a profit to be had there ...

Yesterday was the first time I tried the Adderall booster.  It definitely helped my mood, but I slept like crap last night.  I was exhausted, and hope to sleep like a baby.  As I sometimes (OK, all too frequently) do these days, I had two drinks to make damn sure I would sleep well.

Your Recommended Dose of Irony: My Sunlamp is Depressing Me

In case you haven't read any other post on this blog, I have severe seasonal affective disorder.  Now, you're asking yourself, how "severe" can seasonal affective disorder really be?

It can be SO SEVERE, that's right folks, SO SEVERE that one can become actually psychotic due to lack of sunlight.  (I've written about it here, here, here, and here.  Also, on a lighter note, here.

Since I don't want to wind up psychotically depressed again, I sit in front of a sunlamp.  A lot.  My sunlamp is in my brightly-lit art studio, which also has full-spectrum lighting.  It's very bright in here.  Which is good.  It helps me.  But it's also getting kind of old.

I need to sit by the sunlamp in the morning, so I do that while checking my email and blogging.  Then I get distracted by checking my email and blogging ... and besides, I just feel so much better when I'm by the lamp.  So I'm here at 9:30 or 10 every morning, eating breakfast and messing around on my computer.  I do that for a couple of hours.

Then, I have to be back in front of the sunlamp when it starts to get dark.  My mood slumps, sometimes severely, between the hours of 4 and 7 pm.  Now that it's getting noticeably dim by 3:30, I have to be here by that point, or the dreaded slump begins.  On days when it's rainy and dark I just park myself here and stay all day.

The problem is that it gives me no flexibility in my afternoon schedule.  Having lunch with a friend from 1 to 3?  Can't stay an extra hour.  Can't run errands afterward.  Can't come home and exercise -- nope, need to sit in front of the damn lamp.  And it's not like I can move the lamp; I need to be in my studio, where it's generally bright, or I start to slump.  Anyway, having a light that emits 10,000 lux seriously strains your eyes if it's all up in your face in an otherwise not-brightly-lit room.

"Falling Back": SAD, The Return to Standard Time, and How I Survived It

On Sunday, the clocks officially got turned back by an hour.  On the plus side, an extra hour of sleep.  On the minus side, the sun sets an hour earlier.  And on the double-plus minus side (ha! see what I did there?), at this time last year is when I really began to lose it.

I was at home in Minnesota for a family wedding a year ago.  My visit had been great.  We'd had a lovely, late Indian Summer*.  The days were balmy -- I didn't even need a coat most of the time -- but the nights were cold enough that frost was forming on the ponds.  Since we've all grown up, the younger family members and friends have scattered all over the country, and all over the world.  Most of us (not me) have demanding careers.  We hadn't all been in one place since my brother graduated from high school ten years before.

After the wedding reception we set our clocks back (which, I'm just now realizing, means the happy couple added an hour to their wedding night ... clever!).  The next day we had a nice post-wedding brunch at one of the bride's parents homes.  And when we started home at around 4:30, and it was already dusk, I thought, bleahhh ...".