I knew things were not right when I had to throw a towel over the broken Ikea lamp to block its light. How did I get here? I use high-end and creative technology for a living, however, it took me two years to get rid of a pair of broken, old Ikea lamps in my room. Then I got the low lights from Govee which changed everything.
Those Ikea lamps were there two years after I moved from Orange County to Los Angeles. Shortly after that move, my mother’s Parkinson’s disease – an incurable neurodegenerative condition – progressed rapidly, my mental health suffered, and most of my to-do list quietly went on the back burner as she lost her mobility and urgent matters took over. So the big, bad lights just… stayed. They became part of the background, like everything else I was ignoring.
I didn’t even connect them to the smart plug – another small upgrade I ended up adding to my bedroom, despite having all the apartments – which meant I had to get up every time I wanted to turn it on.
One blasted a heavy, stark light from the cracked shadows. One was warm – but not warm enough – so I solved that problem in one tired night by throwing a towel over it. Yes, fire hazard. Yes, I meant it as a temporary fix for a few days. But the scattered care brain means that short-term fixes can turn into long-term solutions. At some point, it stopped feeling temporary and just became my new normal, even if it wasn’t.
Then my brother bought my mom and me two different Govee Uplighter Floor lamps for Christmas, and my Ikea lamp woes were over. I didn’t expect to have such an emotional attachment to the lamp. But I did, and now it’s one of my favorite gadgets.
The Govee was quick and easy to assemble, and very thin, taking up much less space than the old lamps. As I removed the old one and set up the new one, I felt a strange sense of relief and a slight sense of control that I hadn’t felt since the move.
Within a week, the old lamp was out of my room. That little shift gave me a boost. I started to tear down some corners that had been quietly piled up, things that I had been walking around for months without really seeing anymore.
The bedroom stopped feeling like an unfinished project I was struggling with, and I started to feel stronger. Calmer. Like a place where I could finally breathe. My days tend to feel organized in terms of what mom needs and what needs to be done next. I don’t think about my place at all, except for something else I haven’t found yet. Having a room that felt calm, even just a little bit, made it easier to wind down at the end of the day instead of carrying that feeling of being “on” all the way into the night. It brought me back to me, if only a little.
I could relax in a way I had never had time for, without feeling like I had to get up and do something else. I could turn off the light on my phone instead of getting up. I could go from cool to warm without needing a towel and risking a fire. There’s a slow ripple effect on the wall and, for reasons I can’t fully explain, it helps me sleep. Cycling through soft colors in the app and synchronizing it with ambient music is soothing. Sometimes, the changing colors feel like magic, and I find myself looking at it the way I might have as a child, reminded – briefly – that life can be more playful than it feels. The warm, shifting light seems to have the same effect on my mother, who I live with, sometimes comforting and brightening her as she navigates some of the more difficult parts of the disease, like sunsets, and her silent grief over losing her pieces.
And I love that it does all that and more without asking for much. Setup took about 15 to 20 minutes and didn’t require me trying to wrap my head around tools. You control it with the Govee app on your phone, and because it supports Matter, you can also pair it with platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant for voice control. It offers a wide variety of colors, as well as 80 preset scenes and seven music modes. At $179.99, it’s more expensive, but it’s versatile, serving as three lights in one: a top section that casts a soft ripple on the ceiling, a colorful center light, and a standard white light below.
It’s an amazing gift, really, and I’m so grateful for it. Mine, however, had one problem: Sometimes it forgets to be a light. It doesn’t drop Wi-Fi. It doesn’t show as offline in the app. It just randomly turns off. The first time it happened, I watched it again Stranger Things to prepare for last season. The lights were shining on the mirror, and then my room went dark. The vibe went from relaxing to terrifying in a second, as I briefly wondered if reality and TV had merged (I may have had too much wine). Once my mind was rebooted, I opened the Govee app and opened it again. No problem. I thought it was a power or Wi-Fi problem. Govee sent me a new unit that worked great.
When it works – which is most of the time – it quietly improves my life. And somehow, that’s enough to make it one of my favorite new gadgets. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped me start taking care of my environment – and myself – again.
