posted
Does anyone else find their symptoms, primarily mental ones, worsen with certain weather?
I live in NJ and it has been gray and miserable looking for 4 days now.
I am having a hard time-headaches, excess anxiety, and having to fight to keep my moods up.
Worst of all is when I start getting these feelings, all the progress I've made seems far away and I start to get nervous that I'll go back to being what i was which of course makes the anxiety worse.
It starts out as organic, I will be watching something or cleaning and all the sudden adrenaline will start flowing, and of course I get freaked. Normally I can deal with this, but it seems like the miserable days-many in a row-makes it a big uphill battle.
I know I am defecient in Vit D and part of me wonders if thats connected to this. I am supplementing it, but one thing I can say for sure is I am really looking forward to Wednesday when I get to see the sun again.
I am seriously considering get a light therapy lamp for days like this.
Posts: 594 | From NJ/NY | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
steve1906
Frequent Contributor (1K+ posts)
Member # 16206
posted
Hi Elley, I'm from Boston, Ma and I totally agree that weather will do this to you. Ever since Lyme I hate the winter (more two years). all m symptoms are much worse in the cold weather.
Keep warm, spring is around the corner.
Roy
-------------------- Everything I say is just my opinion! Posts: 3529 | From Massachusetts Boston Area | Registered: Jul 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
I live on the east coast and totally hear you. I'm currently reading a book on 'light therapy' though. 'Light - Medicine of the Future' by Dr. Jacob Liberman.
The author first became interested in light therapy when he was able to cure a young girl's 20/200 myopia (in one eye) using colored light therapy shined into her better (20/20) eye. I believe it took 5 30-minute sessions to cure it permanently, but she is now a young adult and still cured.
I'm not sure if this would work for someone who has two 'bad' myopic eyes though, like me, or someone older. It's possible, too, that children are more easily healed with light therapy than adults are. Pinpoint pupils are one of my symptoms though, day and night - they almost never enlarge anymore.
He mentions in his book how only 9% of the total population suffers from vision problems, but of these, 66% suffer from depression issues, and he doesn't believe that this is just coincidental.
According to the author, flashing red lights are supposed to stop migraines (though the intensity of the light and flash rate is highly individual). Blue lights are supposed to help rheumatoid arhritis. Blue and red lights used in combination are supposed to help calm anxiety. And (I think) blue and yellow-green lights are what cure myopia. I'm not sure which of these require flashing lights, other than the migraine therapy.
I went so far as to buy colored light-bulbs, but I've yet to try them out. What I have tried is 'happy light' blu light therapy. (By the way, I'm not selling this)...
Though I see no improvement in my sleep from using it, and I still experience mood swings, panic attacks, and sometimes agitation, I do notice that sitting in front of this light in the late afternoon or early evening can almost instantly calm my nerves and stop my mind from racing from one bad thought to another. I think it works better for me later in the day than first thing in the morning or at night. Also, my symptoms often return if I turn it off and walk away from it.
I became interested in light therapy though when I noticed that certain solar events seemed to trigger (or even improve) my symptoms. Sunspots, coronal holes, coronal mass ejections, geomagnetic storms, solar magnetic filaments, things of that nature.
Most people don't believe I can feel these, but my boyfriend does. Every time I tell him something has majorly changed 'magnetically', it almost certainly has when we check. Likewise, I know my symptoms were horrific around the time of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.
Apparently though the sun is losing brightness and power, so it doesn't surprise me that we are all likely light starved...
You might want to look into this theory, maybe even experiment with colored light bulbs in your home.
Posts: 495 | From USA | Registered: Mar 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
elizzza thats very intersting. I am going to look at these links. I'm very interested in this as a therapy.
Posts: 594 | From NJ/NY | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Definitely look into this. In the book, the author actually includes pictures of how plants grow under certain colored lights, and when certain colors are missing, some of them look pretty weary and stressed...
Posts: 495 | From USA | Registered: Mar 2010
| IP: Logged |
I really think something strange is going on with the sun in recent years, because even when I spend all day outdoors in the summer, my symptoms still increase, so my guess is that only certain colors will help me, not just full spectrum sunlight. Sometimes the sunlight even makes things worse.
Here's something interesting though that I found with regard to MS...
The positive correlation of MS rates with latitude has been known for a long time [16] and has been taken to suggest a role of cosmic radiation [17, 18]. Interestingly enough, Resch [18] found a better correlation with geomagnetic latitude, a proxy for cosmic radiation, than with the geographical latitude. It may be noted however that the emigration pattern in the world is such that north Europeans carrying a high incidence of MS have settled in those areas which are relatively adjacent to the magnetic poles, that is, in parts of North America and Australia.
The same possible confounding effect from the emigration pattern might affect also another hypothesis considering MS and latitude, namely a suggested suppressive effect of ultraviolet radiation on autoimmunity [19], a possibility clearly strengthened by a recent study [20].
Posts: 495 | From USA | Registered: Mar 2010
| IP: Logged |
The Lyme Disease Network is a non-profit organization funded by individual donations. If you would like to support the Network and the LymeNet system of Web services, please send your donations to:
The
Lyme Disease Network of New Jersey 907 Pebble Creek Court,
Pennington,
NJ08534USA http://www.lymenet.org/
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic