Redljusterpi and anxiety

To be human is to have anxiety sometimes. Even the happiest people imaginable struggle with things and demons. It's simply how evolution kept our ancestors on their toes and prepared them for both. You can easily imagine how difficult it would be for a person to survive as a hunter/gatherer if they were completely satisfied with existence in every way. No worries about whether there would be any berries to pick tomorrow, or whether that beaver living by the lake would bite back when it was felled. No thoughts about how to make life as safe as possible for yourself and your loved ones. No thought at all of the approaching winter with freezing temperatures and an impenetrable blanket of snow. Nor does any planning about how to best protect one's tools, clothes and food supplies give a comprehensive picture of a person who may be carefree, but also clueless and quite soon this would have been weeded out by evolution.

We carry these genes with us and today the same instincts are channeled in new ways. When you wake up in the wee hours and can't get back to sleep, it's hardly the supply of blueberries that worries you, but rather the job, relationships and the state of the world. The feeling of anxiety can take over people's lives and it becomes rather a limitation in existence, rather than an aid to survival. There are also people where anxiety completely dominates their emotional life and it is called generalized anxiety disorder. Interestingly, RLT has been shown to help with just this severe type of near-constant feelings of anxiety.

In one study, subjects had their foreheads treated with an RLT lamp every day for 20 minutes (1). Anxiety eased measurably and the subjects reported better night's sleep. The treatment is called transcranial and it is above all the near-infrared light that can penetrate the skull so deeply that an effect is achieved. In this study, the wavelength was 830 nm and no side effects were reported. Possibly the red light can also help given the systemic effect with less inflammation, and in any case it does no harm to use both types of light.

If you want to achieve a transcranial treatment, it is good to lie on your back with your head when the lamp that is allowed to illuminate the top of your head. The skull bone is thinnest at the temples and perhaps it is a good idea to sit with the side facing the lamp for maximum effect. The important thing is that the lamp is high enough to reach above the head. The advantage of the sitting position is that you also treat the rest of the body at the same time.

Transcranial Photobiomodulation with Near-Infrared Light for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Pilot Study – PubMed (nih.gov)

Author: Fredrik Paulún