Seasonal Affective Disorder: Mastering Mood with Light, Exercise & Diet | Ben Greenfield

Ah, the dark, dreary gray of winter make you a little sad. My name is Ben Greenfield.

I'm a biohacker, celebrity trainer, nutritionist, New.

York Times best selling author and world renowned speaker. I'm on a constant quest to uncover.

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Seasonal affective disorder. And this is an issue that a lot of people, including myself, can get. When it gets dark and the day gets dark early and it gets light much later on in the morning, us human beings tend to have a feel good neurotransmitter response. Particularly bright light, such as the spectrum that you would get from sunlight and when that's absent and especially when that's paired with cold and with the change of seasons can kind of help us to feel a little bit down. So what do you do about that? Well, I want to tell you a story. If you look at the forest out here behind my house, my sons and I will sometimes go out in the season leading up to these dark fall and winter days and we'll harvest something called St. John's Wort. So it's a little yellow flower and we call it the happy flower. We take it, we'll soak these little flowers in alcohol. We'll make a tincture out of this little yellow St. John's Wort flour. And it turns out that that has some of the very same compounds that you'd find in an antidepressant, but without a lot of the side effects of an antidepressant. But that's just a very simple example. I think that there are more powerful things that you can do that are natural and even very inexpensive to help you deal with some of the issues of depression and seasonal affective disorders. What are some of those things? Well, first of all, exercise and movement is key. It's hard not to feel good after a good exercise session, preferably in a well lit gym or outdoors when it is light outside in the winter. Even so called microdoses of exercise. Just throwing in a few kettlebell swings here and there, some push ups, some.

Burpees, some pull ups, some air squats.

Google the New York Times 7 Minute Workout, a scientifically based workout that lets you feel good within just seven minutes of bodyweight exercise and you've got a perfect key to both blood flow and and health, but also feeling good. What else? I mentioned light. Even when it's dark and gray outside, you're getting little bits of sunlight through those clouds which can help you to feel better. Now you can of course, use things like red light panels and red light therapy and infrared saunas and things like this. But know that by just getting outside, even if it looks dark and gray outside, you can actually feel good because you're getting a little bit of sunlight through those clouds, heat and cold. Going for a walk outside with a little less clothing than you might be accustomed to, going into the gym and doing a workout session using a little more clothing than you might be accustomed to. By moving blood flow through the body using rigors of heat and rigors of cold, you can feel a lot better and increase your mood even without spending a lot of money on, say like a sauna or a cold plunge. And then finally, my last easy tip for you that you don't have to spend a lot of money on to.

Feel good during the winter are fats.

It turns out that healthy fats, DHA and oleic acid, and omega 3 fatty acids such as you would find in good clean fish seeds and nuts and avocados and olive oil and avocado oil and Mediterranean omega 3 rich fatty acids can be fantastic for lining the nerves and the myelin sheaths of your brain and allowing yourself to spark up happiness. Because your nerves and your central nervous system are getting the fuel that they need to make these feel good. Chemicals that help you to combat seasonal affective disorder and depression that onsets in.

The fall and the winter.

Now let's talk about a few little upgrades that you can implement to actually feel even better during the cold dark days of fall and winter. I want to share with you three of my go to strategies that are still things that require a little bit more of a spend but that are accessible to a lot of people. And it's as follows. You may have heard of so called sad boxes, seasonal affective disorder boxes. They're also known as blue light boxes. And I have in my office several bright lights that I use. One is a special light that blasts my eyes with a 40 Hz frequency, which is a feel good gamma frequency for the brain. Another couple of light sources in my office are the awake and alert bulbs from Lighting Science, which allow for a bluish green spectrum very similar to sunlight right in my office that helps give me this uptick in energy and mood. And then there are glasses. Glasses that were originally designed to help with jet lag and circadian rhythm, but that also have a significant impact on seasonal affective disorder. A couple of glasses that I use for this one's called the Retimer. Another Very small set is called the auras. And these produce a bluish green spectrum that's actually fantastic for combating seasonal affective disorder. So we've got different forms of light, such as light boxes and wearable glasses. But then you've also got the idea of heat and cold. There's nothing that makes you feel good.

Like heat and cold.

I know getting in a cold pool can be tough, and I know feeling like your heart's gonna pound out your chest inside a sauna can sometimes be a little bit difficult. But if you regularly engage with something like an infrared sauna and a cold plunge, or a cold tub or a cold shower during the dark days of fall and winter, you're gonna see an uptick in mood. That's incredible. As a matter of fact, I want.

To share something very interesting with you.

The country of Finland is a country in which most people do not genetically produce something called brain derived neurotrafficial factor bdnf, which is one of the components of your nervous system that allows you to feel good. Yet Finland is known as the world's happiest country. Why is that? Well over 40,000 homes within Finland all have a sauna and a regular practice of visiting the sauna and by the way, jumping into the icy cold Baltic Sea or taking a cold shower, doing a cold plunge, that's just what you do in Finland. And even though they should have the highest, highest incidences arguably of seasonal affective disorder and depression, because of the environment.

That they're in, they don't because of their sauna and their cold practice.

So consider using light, heat and cold to combat depression and that down mood.

In the fall and winter and you're definitely going to feel a lot better.

I want to let you in now on a couple of the top hacks and secrets that I use not only to feel good during the fall and winter, but to literally build my brain to stave off dementia and Alzheimer's and improve mood remarkably. Now these are head worn devices and I want to tell you about some of the top ones out there. There's something called a Vielight. A Vielight delivers cranial and nasal red light therapy to the mitochondria in the brain that has a remarkable feel good effect and also helps to feed the cells in your brain to produce more ATP. There are also helmets, like the neuronic red light helmet, which does something very similar. You put it on and in just six minutes, using the mood function, it can help you to feel better. Now, in addition to this, there are Other headborne devices that offer neurofeedback. Neurofeedback is something that can train your brain to shift into certain brainwave states, almost like weight training for your mind. So one of my favorite neurofeedback devices, devices that I use right now is called the Sensei S E N S A I. There's also a device called the Muse which acts similarly. And these devices can actually assist with training your brain to shift into a mood state that you desire. And then there are so called light sound stimulating machines that use a near hypnotic trance to shift you into meditation, put your body into a state where it can produce its own feel good chemicals and allow for you to just step away from all the madness or the drop in mood and feel way better in a very short period of time. A couple of devices I like for that. There's one called the Braintap, there's one called the Neurovisor, and I have a whole office full of all these things I could put on my head. The Neuronic helmet, the Vielight, the Sensei, the Braintap or the Neurovisor. I don't use them all every day, but I mix and match and just grab certain ones that I use at random intervals during the week. And having access to this whole suite of devices that normally you'd have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for at a fancy neurofeedback clinic and that now are available B2C for people to have in their own home.

These are all things that you can.

Have access to to feel better and to build your brain and to stave off seasonal affective disorder and that drop in mood that occurs during the fall and winter. So I feel great right now. It's dark and gray outside. I use the tips I just shared with you. So good luck.

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