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Insomnia and the use of Bright Light Therapy
By Donald Saunders
The use of light as a therapeutic tool has a long history, with reports of sunlight
being used to treat depression and lethargy over 2000 years ago in ancient
Greece and Rome. The use of light in therapy today however stems largely
from research carried out in the 1980s that looked at the cycle of depression,
and other problems, associated with changes in the seasons of the year.
Many of the body's functions are regulated by an internal clock which operates
on a pattern that repeats roughly every 24 hours and that gives a rhythm to our
lives. Indeed, this is often referred to as the body's circadian rhythm, from the
Latin 'circa dies' meaning 'about a day'.
Unlike your kitchen clock or wrist watch, however, which are more often than
not powered by batteries these days, your body clock is essentially a chemical
clock and is powered by a variety of different environmental factors, the most
significant of which is the alternating pattern between daylight to darkness.
In simple terms, as your body senses the fall of darkness it sends out signals,
shutting down many of your body's functions in preparation for sleep.
Similarly, as daylight returns, signals are again sent out for these same
functions to start up again.
So just how can we apply this knowledge to the treatment of insomnia?
There are three main types of insomnia ¨C initial, or sleep onset, insomnia
(difficulty falling asleep), middle insomnia (difficulty remaining asleep through
the night) and late, or terminal, insomnia (waking too early in the morning). It
is in the first and last of these three that light therapy can be particularly useful.
In the case of initial insomnia your body clock has often shifted so that, instead
of sending out the chemical signals to start shutting down at say ten or eleven
o'clock in the evening, your body doesn¡¯t start sending out the necessary
messages until perhaps one or two o'clock in the morning.
Similarly, at perhaps seven o'clock in the morning, when you should be
starting your day, your body clock hasn't yet started to send out its 'wake up'
signals and won¡¯t be doing so for perhaps another three or four hours.
To solve this problem, and to re-adjust your body clock, bright light therapy
can be used in the morning to get you up and going. If bright light therapy is
used for perhaps thirty minutes to an hour each morning for several days, your
internal body clock will gradually shift to align itself with your normal sleeping
routine.
The same treatment can be applied in the case of late insomnia. In this case
your body clock is set too early so that it is telling you to go to bed before it is
time to do so and similarly to get up too early.
Here, bright light therapy can again be used to re-adjust your body clock, but
now needs to be applied in the evening, rather than in the morning.
Although bright light therapy is being used increasingly to treat insomnia it
remains very much a secondary form of treatment and has yet to achieve the
prominence that it deserves. It is, however, gaining ground in the treatment of
insomnia associated with two specific problems, those of jet lag and shift work,
and so it is perhaps only a matter of time before it becomes a far more widely
used form of treatment for insomnia generally.
Copyright 2005 Donald Saunders - http://help-me-to-sleep.com
About the Author
Donald Saunders is the author of a number of health-related publications including "How To Get A Good Night’s Sleep". Pick up your free copy today and learn the secret to better sleep or visit Help-Me-To-Sleep.com to learn more about insomnia
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