The 15-minute trick to prevent the disruption daylight saving has on our sleep

Losing an hour of sleep when the clocks turn forward for daylight saving isn’t just an annoyance, it has a huge impact on our health. 

The effects range from poor concentration, fatigue and moodiness, to an increase in car crashes and a higher risk of heart attacks and stroke. But we can help prevent these things occurring in the days following the time change on October 4 by making one simple tweak now.

Alison Wimms, Director of Medical Affairs at Resmed, told nine.com.au that daylight saving is confusing for our bodies, which love consistency and run to an internal timekeeping system called the circadian clock, as it means waking up when you’re used to being in deep sleep.

We can start adjusting to this now by setting our alarm clocks 15 minutes earlier each day in the lead up to the start of daylight saving time to make it less of a shock to the system. It’s also worth getting some morning sunlight as soon as possible as this is what informs the circadian rhythm that the day has started.

“If you're not such a morning person, that's also the kind of best thing to do [so it’s] not an abrupt change, but try to keep going,” she said.

This also means keeping to that earlier time on Saturday morning when you feel like sleeping in. The same goes for Sunday when you might be tempted to stay in bed longer to make up for the lost hour.

Read more

‘I would’ve died’: A Google search told Fiona she wasn’t having a heart attack - adding one word changed everything

“We’re trying to be consistent as well. What we don’t want to do is set the alarm clock, be sleep-deprived all week and have a huge sleep in on the weekend. That’s going to make it harder for your body to adjust, and it makes your body more confused, it’s going to take longer overall,” she said.

“Try to move the clock forward over the next few days, stick to the new time, get up every morning, get that natural sunlight.”

The advice isn’t the same for the time you go to bed though because it’s not as easy to fall asleep at a specific time as it is to wake up on command. 

Instead, Wimms encourages “following good sleep hygiene, so avoiding the screens in the evening, avoiding the bright lights later in the afternoon, try and keep caffeine to a minimum, especially after lunchtime, and general things like keeping the bedroom dark and quiet and cool and just relaxing before bedtime... take a bath, read a book, something that you really wind down with.”

But don’t worry about whether you’ll be able to sleep an hour earlier once daylight saving starts because that will make it more difficult to fall asleep.

“We have to be a little patient with ourselves as well. The worst thing that you can do with sleep is stress about it, worry about it, try to force it. It's not something that you can make happen, it's something that happens to you. So, you just have to relax, let it come when it's going to come.”

Read more

Regular wake and bedtimes are often recommended for better sleep, but one of them could be making things worse

Whether you’ve prepared for daylight saving or not, being consistent with wake times once the clocks have gone forward is important.

“We just want to try to stay again avoiding weekend sleep-ins and trying to let our bodies know that every day we wake up at this time. Then your body is going to start moving its processes into this new time zone, and most people should only take a couple of days, at max a week, to adjust to the new time zone,” Wimms said.

Daylight saving can be a struggle for some groups more than others including night owls, children – who associate bedtime with darkness and women who are pregnant, at a stage of their cycle that affects their sleep or in perimenopause.

Many of us are already struggling with sleep with a ResMed survey finding that only 58 per cent of us are getting four or fewer good nights of sleep a week. So, if you are still having trouble sleeping a week after the clocks go forward you should see a doctor in case of problems like chronic insomnia or obstructive sleep apnea.

“This is a condition where you stop breathing during the night, and the most common symptoms of that would be snoring, very loud, disruptive snoring, gasping for breath… Women have symptoms like more daytime fatigue, so less sleepiness, but just low energy, unrefreshing sleep, never being able to get energy during the day, and sometimes even insomnia for women with obstructive sleep apnoea,” Wimms said. 

“If you have that [seven to nine hours of] time in bed, and you can’t sleep during that time, or you sleep, but you never feel good during the day, it’s definitely time to talk with the doctor and do some more tests to understand what’s going on.”