Six Tips to Make the Most of Daylight Savings
By Eleanor McGlinchey, PhD
It’s Daylight Savings again - fall back
Hopefully you were able to enjoy that extra hour of sleep that came quietly in the night earlier this month. The end of Daylight Saving often feels like a turning point in the calendar year - and not just because the time literally changes on us, but also because of the ways our bodies must adjust. It also presents an opportunity to examine our sleep practices and see if there are some “sleep stealers” lurking around. Maybe counterintuitively, sleeping well takes some work!
Make the most of that Daylight Savings extra hour
Here are a few common practices to consider that may help you make the most of Daylight Savings this time of year. Take stock on how you’re doing with each one:
1. Tech in the bedroom. There has been plenty of media coverage on this one and yet, it has become increasingly difficult to disconnect from tech at night. The standard recommendation is to shut off devices at least an hour before bed. This includes phones, tablets, computers and TVs. All of these devices emit blue light. Blue light tells our brains that it is daytime – so even though it is dark outside by 5pm, using our devices in the evening will lead our bodies to believe that it is the middle of the day. It may not be realistic to shut your devices off when the sun goes down but it is worth trying to power down the hour before you’d like to doze off.
2. Too hot in the bedroom. In many buildings in New York City, the radiators all come to life around the same time the Daylight Saving time ends. I am all for landlords providing adequate heat in our buildings but sometimes it goes a bit too far and makes it extra hard to sleep. The ideal sleep room temperature is between 60-65 degrees. This allows our bodies to get deep and restorative sleep stages at night. If your bedroom is too hot, consider putting on a fan or cracking a window to cool things down at night.
3. Too many activities in bed. Do you work in bed? Do you eat in bed? Do you watch movies/shows in bed? Some of us really love our beds and so we end up coming home from work and doing all our evening activities in bed. That can sometimes make it so that our bodies associate the bed with all these other activities and not with sleep, thus making it harder to get restful sleep when we want to. Reserve the bed for sleep and sex. Instead of doing all your activities in bed, think about whether you should add another cozy inviting area to your living space so that your bed isn’t the only comfy place for all these activities.
4. Worries in the bedroom. For some, laying down for sleep at night is your first quiet moment of the day. With nothing else to distract, you might start remembering your to-do list for the next day, that thing you said to your colleague that might have offended her, the fact that this is around the same time of year that important relationship ended last year, or [fill in any number of worries from mundane to critical]. Similar to the above point on too many activities in the bed, worrying in bed might actually start to “train” your body that the bed is the place for worrying. If this happens to you, try setting aside some “worry time” during the day when you may have more resources to deal with those worries. Even 15 minutes of writing your worries in a journal can contribute to less worrying in bed at bedtime.
5. Inconsistent bedtimes and wake-up times. Procrastination at bedtime is likely related to many of the aforementioned activities like using tech at night, whatever you do to unwind in the evening, or perhaps simply not looking at the clock and only going to bed when you feel like it. When you go to bed at a different time each night, it can confuse your body’s circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is your 24-hour internal clock that signals to your body the time of day. While your circadian rhythm can be affected by many factors, bedtime and wake-up time are all aligned around this body rhythm. When you go to bed at a different time each night, you are basically telling your body clock that you are changing time zones, which eventually mimics the experience of being constantly jetlagged! Realizing the importance of a stable bedtime is key for good sleep – for both adults and kids!
6. The snooze button. It is so tempting to hit the snooze button in the morning, but engaging in extensive snoozing routines is literally stealing sleep from you. What if you had not snoozed and just set your alarm for when you actually got out of bed? How many minutes of uninterrupted sleep would you have added to your total sleep time? Instead, hearing the snooze alarm go off every 10 minutes interrupts your body’s natural wake-up processes and leaves you feeling groggy and extra fatigued relative to if you had just gotten out of bed with the alarm. Snoozing can also contribute to the inconsistent wake-up times mentioned in the previous point, thus further confusing your jetlagged brain into thinking you flew to the Central Time Zone overnight.
Consider treatment for insomnia and sleep problems
If you are already practicing all of the above and still experiencing sleeplessness, consider talking to a professional or your therapist about whether you might benefit from Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I). If you didn’t take that hour earlier this month to literally sleep, can I invite you now to think about ways of incorporating a new sleep and rest practice into your routine in the coming weeks? Research shows that even just 20 extra minutes of sleep per night can lead to meaningful improvements in things like mood, memory, and the ability to sustain attention. Hopefully starting a new sleep and rest practice can be a restorative reset for the upcoming winter months.
About the Therapist: Dr. Eleanor McGlinchey is a staff psychologist at MTC. While she has never stayed awake for more than 24 hours herself, she once worked as a research assistant in a sleep deprivation lab where her job was to help participants stay awake for 88 hours! (They passed the time watching a lot of The Sopranos.)