u/kittykalista

I’m wondering if anyone can relate to this or can offer any advice. I’ve been doing a combination treatment of light/dark therapy and melatonin since December. I’ve experimented with light therapy times between 30 mins and 6 hours, melatonin dosages between 300 mcg and 3 mg, different timing, and different lifestyle factors, and settled into a routine that seems to be working.

Currently I’m doing 30 minutes of light therapy with the Luminette at max brightness at 8:30 am, then using blue blocker glasses and taking 500 mcg of melatonin at 8:30 pm. I’ve also switched to decaf coffee in the morning and otherwise cut out caffeine, stop eating and drinking anything with calories at 8:30, and have been taking 200 mg of magnesium at 10 pm. I’m falling asleep around 11:00-12:00 and waking up around 8 without an alarm.

Earlier in the process I was entrained within windows of a few hours, although it was a bit shaky, and I struggled with feeling exhausted. My mood was a lot lower. After months of fine-tuning and pushing through the process, the window started to narrow. I was up to 6 hours of light therapy when I had to take some time off to recover from LASIK surgery, and as I started to ease back into light therapy after the surgery, I found the fatigue improved substantially I was able to entrain with only 30 minutes, so I’ve stuck with that for the past two months.

My mood is the only thing that I’m still struggling with at this point, and it doesn’t seem to be improving. I’m sad and ruminating like crazy, to the point that I’m crying almost every day. I’ve also been a lot more irritable; my patience has pretty much evaporated, I get angry much more easily and have a harder time letting things go. I do have a long history of treatment resistant depression so the sadness is something I normally struggle with, but the severity increased drastically when I started treatment, and the anger is out of character for me.

I don’t have any new stressors that could be affecting my mood like this, entrainment has actually improved things for me pretty substantially, but I’m feeling a bit stuck emotionally. I’ve been experimenting with slowly lowering the melatonin dose to see if that makes a difference as I know that can sometimes cause mood issues, and I have a follow-up appointment with my doctor in 2 months so I plan to speak to her about it then, but I’m wondering if anyone else has struggled with something similar and what, if anything, helped.

My pup has been struggling with separation anxiety, so I’m considering seeing a veterinary behaviorist. I’ve had Trupanion, including the complementary care coverage, since I brought him home as a puppy, so I’m not concerned about qualifying for coverage. I’m just curious about any experiences and how much of the expense Trupanion covered.

I tried calling Trupanion for guidance, but they couldn’t tell me how much of the cost would be covered without an itemized estimate and the behaviorist won’t provide one, so I’m not quite sure what to expect.

I was approved for the Chase Business Ink Cash in May with the $750 for $6,000 spend in 3 months sign up bonus. Recently, the sign up bonus increased to $1,000 for $8,000 spend in 4 months. I saw some past posts on here about Chase matching increased sign up bonuses, so I called their customer service line to ask about it. The rep informed me that they do not match bonuses, so I would only be eligible for the bonus that was offered when I was approved.

Has anyone else tried this recently? I’m wondering if I got a bad rep or if there was a policy change since the last successful posts.

Just wanted to provide some additional data points in light of Citi cutting off applications for the Custom Cash. I had a Custom Cash application scheduled for my P2 in the next two weeks, and one for myself in the next two months, and only recently found out about the changes.

As of Monday, I was able to product change a Citi Double Cash to a Custom Cash via the online chat for both me and my partner’s accounts. So if you are looking to get a Custom Cash, that option still seems to be available.

I’ve been trying out light/dark therapy for several months now, but I’m still struggling and am trying out a few supportive measures to see if they make a difference. Has anyone found that magnesium supplements make a difference for them, and if so what dose and timing worked best?