Swell. Another grey day. Only this time it's also freezing rain. You hit the snooze button eight times before hauling yourself out of bed. Guzzle three cups of coffee. Drive to work and sit in a grey cubicle all day, stuffing your face with carb-laden junk. You go home in the dark. Repeat for four months.

Welcome to winter in Canada. And quite possibly Seasonal Affective Disorder, which a recent Toronto study says plagues up to 3 per cent of the population (15 to 20 per cent experience what we'd call the winter blahs).

Now that an Alberta company has created a sleek, portable version of the light therapy lamps that have been used for the past 20 years, SAD sufferers and winter haters alike have a cool new tool.

"Thomas Edison screwed everything up by inventing the light bulb," says Larry Pederson, the founder of Litebook (http://www.litebook.com). He's only half-joking. "We've shifted to an indoor lifestyle."

Without enough light, our bodies suffer from something like jet lag and our melatonin (the sleepy hormone) and serotonin (the feel-good hormone) levels get out of whack. The right kind of light, pointed at the eye at a 45-degree angle, seems to recalibrate things.

"There's more than enough evidence to show light therapy is effective," says Raymond Lam, director of the Mood Disorders Clinic at the University of British Columbia. "It's hard to get it to the front lines, though."

Watch self-diagnosing SAD join self-diagnosing ADD as the hobby of the weary modern. The only difference? While light therapy does bear risks of eye damage, headaches and edginess, picking up a Litebook doesn't require a prescription.

It's a fact not lost on the entrepreneurial Pederson.

Ten years ago, the Medicine Hat native moved back from Los Angeles and found himself depressed in winter. He was diagnosed with SAD and somewhat reluctantly tried light therapy. "Within half an hour, I started to feel better," he says. "I got my life back."

The problem was the technology. "The original lamps looked like they were designed by the Russians in the 1950s," he says. "I had an epiphany: I wanted mine to look like my Discman."

After enlisting the help of contacts at Alberta's Defence Research Establishment Suffield, Pederson was then able to take advantage of a powerful new invention, the white LED. Using this super-bright light-emitting diode, the team could make light therapy portable.

Ever on a budget, Pederson asked two industrial design grad students from the University of Calgary to design the device. And the Litebook was born in 1999. Now, it's the size of a hand and comes in a nifty carrying case, either with an adapter ($249) or a lithium battery ($319).

There's also a funky travel kit with built-in software ($399) to tell you when to use the light to reset your jet-lagged body clock.

Pederson is marketing his products to shift workers, people who travel constantly and people who experience changes in sleeping habits, such as those over 50 and teenagers. He has even had a request from Dubai to sell the product to veiled women who suffer from lack of light exposure.

"It's only going to get lighter, smaller, faster, better," he says.

The next phase? Forget Discman analogies, why not the iPod-ification of the Litebook? Just imagine the potential for a Louis Vuitton carrying case. Our children will laugh when we tell them SAD lights were once as big as our hands.

Then again, what about a little convergence? Maybe your BlackBerry will be your SAD lamp too.

Pederson is exploring ways to integrate the Litebook into new spaces: the gym or the car, places where people can get early-morning exposure, which seems the most beneficial. In our time-crunched universe, "fatigue management" is the next buzz phrase.

"I became involved in the late eighties, when light boxes were unwieldy and patients had to use them for at least two hours," says psychiatrist Maria Corral, a clinical associate professor at UBC who studies the link between SAD and postpartum depression. "Now that they're smaller, more manageable and more intense, it can take only 30 minutes."