The Govee Smart Bulb has brightened up my room, and then my life

I knew things weren’t right when I had to throw a towel over the broken IKEA lamp to block its light. How did you get here? I work in the fancy, tech-savvy industry for a living, and yet, it took me two years to get rid of a pair of old, broken IKEA lamps in my bedroom. Then I got some floor lamps from Govee that changed everything.

Ikea lamps have been around for two years after they moved from Orange County to Los Angeles. Shortly after the move, my mother’s Parkinson’s disease — a neurodegenerative condition for which there is no cure — progressed rapidly, my mental health took a hit, and most of my to-do list quietly moved to the back burner as I lost mobility and more pressing matters took their place. And so the big, ugly lamps remained… they remained. They became part of the background, like everything else I didn’t care about.

I didn’t even plug it into a smart plug — another small upgrade I’d been meaning to add to my bedroom, despite having it all over the apartment — which meant I had to get up every time I wanted to turn it on.

Someone shot a harsh, bright light through a cracked shadow. The other was warmer—but not warm enough—so I solved that problem one exhausting night by simply throwing a towel over it. Yes, fire hazard. Yes, I meant it as a temporary solution for a few days. But a distracted mind in caregiving means that temporary fixes can turn into long-term solutions. At some point, the feeling paused and became my new normal, even if it clearly wasn’t.

Then my brother bought my mother and I separately Govee Uplighter Floor Lamps On the occasion of Christmas, the IKEA lamp problems were over. I didn’t expect to develop an emotional attachment to the lamp. But I did, and it’s now one of my favorite tools.

The Govee was quick and easy to assemble, much smaller, and took up much less space than the old bulbs. When I got rid of the old one and installed the new one, I felt a strange sense of relief and a slight sense of control that I hadn’t felt since that step.

Within a week, the old lamp was out of my room. This small shift gave me momentum. I began to quietly arrange the other corners that had accumulated, the things I had been wandering around for months without seeing anymore.

The bedroom no longer felt like an unfinished project I was just living through, and I began to feel grounded. Quieter. Like a place where I can finally breathe. I often feel like my days are structured around what mom needs and what needs to be done next. I don’t really think about my private space at all, other than as something else I haven’t figured out yet. Having a room that feels calm, even just a little, makes it easier to relax at the end of the day rather than carrying that feeling of being “on” all the way into the night. It brought me back to myself, even if just a little.

I could relax in a way I hadn’t in a while, without feeling like I had to get up to do something else. I can turn off the flashlight on my phone instead of standing up. I can go from cold mode to warm mode without needing a towel and risking a fire. There’s a ripple effect of it slowly moving across the wall that, for reasons I can’t fully explain, really helps me sleep. Navigating through the soft colors in the app and syncing it to the ambient music is convenient. Sometimes, the changing colors seem a little magical, and I find myself watching them the way I did when I was a kid, and remembering – briefly – that life can be more fun than I’ve felt in a while. The warm, shifting light seemed to have a similar effect on my mother, who lives with me, sometimes comforting and even dazzling her as she navigated some of the more difficult parts of the illness, such as sunset, along with her quiet grief at losing parts of herself.

And I love that it does all that and more without asking for too much. Setup took about 15 to 20 minutes and didn’t require me to try to get around the tools. You can control it through 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 range of colors, along with 80 preset scenes and seven music modes. At $179.99, it’s pricey, but versatile, and essentially acts as three lights in one: a top section that casts a soft ripple on the ceiling, a colored middle light, and a plain white light at the bottom.

It’s a really wonderful gift, and I’m so grateful for it. However, I only had one problem: Sometimes it forgets to turn on the lamp. Never lose Wi-Fi service. It does not appear in offline mode in the app. It turns off randomly. The first time it happened, I was rewatching Strange things To prepare for last season. The lights flashed on the screen, and then my room went dark. The atmosphere went from relaxing to terrifying in a split second, as I briefly wondered if reality and television had merged (I might as well have had too much wine). Once my brain rebooted, I opened the Govee app and rebooted it again. No problem. I assumed it was a power or Wi-Fi issue. Govee sent me a new unit that works perfectly.

When it works — which it does most of the time — it quietly makes my life better. Somehow, that was enough to make it one of my new favorite tools. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped me start taking care of my space — and myself — again.