Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday so get more sunlight to improve sleep: Neurologist

Getting more sunlight during the day may help offset the negative effects of Daylight Saving Time, which ends Sunday morning when our clocks fall back at 2 am., a noted neurologist says.

“The bright side of it, which is a pun, is that we will be waking up when there’s more light in the morning,” says Dr. Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s very important for your brain function, it’s really important for your sleep quality and it’s a really important time giver for your circadian clock.”

Daylight Saving is observed in 70 countries and most states in the U.S., with clocks being set ahead one hour in the spring and back one hour in autumn.

Dr. Zee said that for people sensitive to the time change, small changes made as late as Friday night can help prepare for a better Monday morning.

“Start going to bed a little bit later … kind of inch your biological clock to be synchronized to this new time change,” the neurologist said, suggesting delaying normal bedtime by at least 15 minutes Friday and then 30 minutes on Saturday.

What’s more, she said, all of our routines need to find that adjustment as well, including the time we usually eat and exercise.

“Feeding time, light, activity and sleep all have to move in the same direction,” Dr. Zee said.

While the amount of sleep a person needs changes over time, adults are recommended to have between seven and eight hours of sleep, according to the National Blood, Heart and Lung Institute. Napping has shown to improve alertness and performance but only if kept to 20 to 30 minutes; too much napping leads to less sleep in the evening.

Getting a good night’s sleep sometimes requires a conscious effort to go to bed at the same time each night and wake up at the same time, even on weekends, Dr. Zee said. Limiting one’s exposure to light, especially from electronic screens, before bed can aid sleep, as can having a good mattress and sleeping in a dark, cool room with a temperature between 68 and 70 degrees.

“Good sleep habits are fundamental because that’s going to help you be more resilient to changes like this, like the Daylight Saving Time or the daily challenges to our sleep,” Dr. Zee said.

Chronic sleep loss is known to have a wide variety of negative health effects, including an increase risk of disease, loss of mental awareness and judgment, and an increased risk of injury, such as car accidents.

Researchers have long tried to evaluate the effect Daylight Saving has on sleep cycles and how that affects overall health and functions.

A 2016 study in the journal Biological and Medical Rhythm Research found that people tend to transition better during one-hour gain in the fall that the one-hour loss in the spring.

A 2015 study in the journal Clinical Sleep Medicine said that study participants lost about 27 minutes of sleep a night in the week after the start of Daylight Saving Time in March, accounting for a cumulative sleep loss of two hours and 42 minutes.

A 2013 study in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews found that the hour gained in autumn can lead to sleep deprivation for the rest of the week.

Yvonne Harrison, the study’s author and a lecturer at the Liverpool John Moores University, found an increase in the rates of traffic accidents and changes in health and regulatory behaviors during this time, suggesting that sleep deprivation has a more negative impact than first understood.

“The autumn transition is often popularized as a gain of 1 [hour] of sleep but there is little evidence of extra sleep on that night,” Ms. Harris said in the study. “The cumulative effect of five consecutive days of earlier rise times following the autumn change again suggests a net loss of sleep across the week.

“Indirect evidence of an increase in traffic accident rates, and change in health and regulatory behaviors which may be related to sleep disruption suggest that adjustment to daylight saving time is neither immediate nor without consequence.”