The best SAD lamps deserve a spot in your daily wellness routine this winter

With winter creeping ever closer, seeking out the best SAD lamps is a great idea if you typically notice changes in your mental health and energy levels when the daylight hours start to dwindle. Essentially, with darker and drearier days comes reduced exposure to sunlight — and it’s thought that this can mess with your brain and internal body clock, and cause a kind of “winter depression” called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

From getting the chic winter boots and wool coats out of the closet, to spending many cosy Sunday afternoons snuggled on the sofa under a throw blanket watching Gilmore Girls, there’s a lot to love about the colder months. But those endless months of dark winter mornings can really start to wear us down after a while — which is why we’re all about utilising tools like sunrise alarm clocks, vitamin D supplements, and SAD lamps wherever possible.

Feeling a little blue? Scroll to shop some of the SAD lamps we reckon will help you out of your funk.

SKIP TO: How we test SAD lamps | What is a SAD lamp? | How do they work? | How to use one | Our full reviews.

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How we test SAD lamps:

Firstly, we judged every single SAD lamp on whether it met certain criteria — including emitting at least 10,000 lux, and being properly registered with the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Alongside taking into account customer reviews and our own personal experiences with certain SAD lamps, we weighed up everything from the overall look and design, to the number of different functions (e.g. adjusting light temperature and brightness) for each model, when weighing up which lamps were truly deserving of the limelight. Lean more about how we test.

What is a SAD lamp?

Most SAD lamps typically come in the form of light boxes or slim tablet-style lights — and they provide a way for your brain to soak up some of the much-needed bright light that it’s likely missing out on in the dark and gloomy winter months.

To qualify as an effective tool for bright light therapy, your chosen lamp or light box needs to provide 10,000 lux of light (the higher the lux, the brighter the light), and also have filters that remove harmful ultraviolet rays — which is essential if you want to avoid skin and eye damage.

How do SAD lamps work?

A part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is responsible for flagging when light exposure reaches its highest point in the day as ‘midday’ — and our whole internal body clock (aka circadian rhythm) works around this. But when natural daylight is severely lacking in the winter months, everything is thrown out-of-whack — and this is when it’s not unusual to experience symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, like low mood, lethargy, and constant tiredness.