Our bodies and brains know what time it is even without looking at a clock. We get sleepy at night and hungry during the day...and then a time change comes along and throws us for a loop. With one of those time changes fast approaching, once again, here’s how you can prepare your body.
In the fall, we turn the clocks back an hour (hence “spring ahead, fall back”) and get back onto Standard Time (instead of Daylight Saving Time). This means that sunrise will happen at 7 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. Everything that doesn’t run by a digital clock is going to be an hour early, including your kids who wake up at some ungodly hour and your pets who will not understand why dinner is so late.
So how can you prepare yourself ahead of time, and what can you do if the time change arrives and you’re not quite ready? Try these tips.
Adjust your bedtime now
If you’re a night owl, the fall time change is a godsend: all of a sudden, instead of being late to things, you can wake up “on time” and be earlier than you were before. I like to take advantage of this to get extra morning time for a workout or for some peaceful habit like journaling. Instead of 7 a.m. feeling painfully early, it now feels like a nice easy time to roll out of bed.
But if you’re a morning person, you’ll have the opposite problem. You’ll love the morning wakeup but come evening, you’re going to be falling asleep on the couch even earlier than before. (It will be 10 p.m., but it will feel like 11 p.m.)
Get ready for this by delaying your bedtime routine just a tad. If you go to bed 15 minutes later each day, starting today, you won’t have as much of a sudden shock when the time officially changes.
Eat on the new schedule
Your body gets some of its cues about the time of day from the timing of your meals. Use the old traveler’s trick of eating according to your destination’s time zone to help shift your internal clock in the right direction.
Morning meals are particularly helpful in shifting that clock, so you can shift your mealtimes just like you would your bedtime or wake-up time. (This is going to help your pets and children too, so consider a subtle change in mealtimes that is household-wide.) You can change the time each day, as with bedtime, or just decide as a family that you’re eating dinner at 6:30 instead of 6 for the rest of the week. That’ll still help.
Get light at the right times
Daylight is a powerful tool for adjusting our circadian rhythms, as anybody who has used a light box to manage wintertime mental health problems knows. Normally you use your light box in the morning, for example while you’re eating breakfast. The DIY alternative is to simply go for a walk in the morning sunshine.
You don’t want to mess with this by using the light box in the evening, but you can keep yourself on track by getting daylight at the times of day it makes sense, especially in the morning. So keep going for those morning walks, and maybe make an extra effort to avoid staring into a screen late at night.
Don’t get too excited about that “extra hour”
It’s great that we’re going to get an extra nighttime hour; I can certainly use the sleep. But thinking of it as an “extra” hour in our day can make it tempting to find a way to use that hour. Don’t stay up late just because you got a freebie.
Pay attention to how you’re using alcohol and caffeine
Both of these delicious chemicals can affect your sleep, so make sure you’re not overdoing it in either case. If you have a coffee after dinner to help you make it to bedtime, that coffee may mess up your sleep more than you expect. Alcohol is less likely to be an issue with the fall time change than in the spring, but I’ll say it anyway: Even though alcohol can make you feel sleepy, it messes with the quality of the sleep you end up getting. You’ll be happiest if you can get onto a rhythm where you’re sleeping and waking up at appropriate times without chemical assistance.