As we head out of summer, the shorter days combined with all of this working from home are going to present some real challenges when it comes to keeping my circadian rhythm chugging along.

Over the years, I’ve had a variety of light boxes that I’ve used to try to keep my mood up and my sleep solid. For the past couple of years, I’ve used the smaller desktop ones that purport to put out the recommended 10k lumens.

This year though, I decided to step it up a bit and picked up one with a much larger surface area. These LED lamps are similar to the models that are typically used in light-therapy studies. 

This lamp is bright and features a much larger surface area than the the previous (though much cheaper) model that I have used for the past several winters.

As a bonus, I had a couple cheap Gosund wi-fi outlets sitting around so I configured one and created an iOS shortcut to turn the lamp on full blast. I think where I’m headed with this is some kind of trigger to make sure that I have it turned on for at least 30 minutes in the AM and 15 minutes in the afternoon. It’s only September and I can already feel my sleep cycle being interrupted by the shorter days, so here’s hoping.