Golden rules to get your body ready for Daylight Savings
Don’t want to spend the Monday following daylight saving time mourning that hour of sleep you and your best mattress missed out on? We can help make the clock change a little easier. The only catch – you need to get started now.
Daylight saving time starts 10 March in the US and 31 March in Europe, but your preparations should begin at least a few days in advance. As Dr Matt Walker, sleep scientist at Oura, explains, we need to “ease the transition during the ‘spring forward’ daylight savings time shift”. And he’s given us some tips on how to go about it (including the bad sleep habits to avoid).
These small, incremental adjustments to the bedtime routine help our bodies cope with the big change when the clocks go forward. But if that all sounds like a bit too much, don’t panic. There’s only eight months to go until you get that precious hour back…4 things to do ahead of daylight savings time
Daylight saving can feel like an abrupt change, but Dr Walker recommends taking the opposite approach by making small, comfortable adjustments to your sleep schedule. Here’s what he suggests:1. Start waking up earlier
Rather than losing one hour in one go, switch up your schedule so you drop 10 to 20 minutes sleep from your morning every day. Starting a few days before daylight saving kicks in, go to bed and wake up 10 minutes earlier than usual. The next day, make it 20 minutes, then 30, and so on.
By the time Sunday comes around and the clock jumps forward, you’ll be ready to meet it, having already started sleeping in this new time zone.
