This includes blue light from mobile phones, tablets, and other electronics. Morning light will also increase your mood and alertness during the day and helps you sleep better at night.Īvoid bright light in the evening. Morning light helps your body adjust quicker and synchronises your body clock faster – whereas evening light delays your clock. Changing your bedtime 10-15 min earlier or later each day helps your body to gently adjust to the new schedule and eases the jetlag. Gradually transition your body to the new time by changing your sleep schedule slowly over a week or so. Throughout the day you will become increasingly tired as cortisol levels decrease and this will limit the time change’s impact on your sleep. This is because the body releases cortisol in the morning to make you more alert. It’s particularly important to keep the time you wake up in the morning regular. Keep your sleeping pattern regular before and after the clocks change. While any disruption to our circadian rhythm can affect our wellbeing, there are still things we can do to help our body better adjust to the new time: Some people are even entirely unable to adjust to the time change. Night owls tend to find it more difficult to adjust to the spring clock change, whereas morning larks tend to be more affected by the autumn clock change. And, depending on whether you are a natural morning person or a night owl, the spring and autumn clock change might affect you differently. It may take several days or weeks for our body to adjust to the time change and for our tissues and organs to work in harmony again. Our peripheral clocks are still working on the old time and we are experiencing jetlag. When we artificially and abruptly change our daily rhythms, the master clock shifts faster than the peripheral clocks and this is why we feel unwell. The master clock then tells the peripheral clocks in organs and tissues the time via hormone secretion and nerve cell activity. Light naturally controls these circadian rhythms, and every morning our master clock is fine-tuned to the outside world. The most consistent environmental cue is light. Since our rhythm is not precisely 24 hours, it resets daily using rhythmic cues from the environment. Our internal body clocks control all our body’s functions. It shuts down the pineal gland’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin and starts releasing cortisol, a hormone that regulates metabolism.
For example, even before we wake up in the morning, our internal clock prepares our body for waking.
The body can’t do everything at once, so every function in the body has a specific time when it works best. This rhythm is known as our circadian rhythm, and is roughly 24 hours long. This clock controls our basic physiological functions, such as when we feel hungry, and when we feel tired. The reason time changes affect us so much is because of our body’s internal biological “clock”.
There’s also a 6% increase in fatal car crashes the week we “spring forward”. More worryingly, heart attacks, strokes and workplace injuries are higher during the first weeks after a clock change compared with other weeks. In fact, emerging research suggests that moving the clocks twice a year has negative impacts, particularly on our health.ĭuring the first days after the clocks change, many people suffer from symptoms such as irritability, less sleep, daytime fatigue, and decreased immune function. While this made a difference when we heavily relied on coal power, today the benefits are disputed. Daylight saving time was first implemented during the first world war to take advantage of longer daylight hours and save energy.