9 Easy Ways To Help Your Body Adjust To The Time Change
If you find it difficult adjusting to the time change, you’re not alone. Try these easy ways to help your body adjust.
If you find it difficult adjusting to the time change, you’re not alone. The “spring forward” time change in March is harder to adjust to than the “fall back” change in November, due to our circadian rhythms. According to sleep specialists, our inner circadian clock finds it easier to sleep later in the morning than it does to fall asleep earlier at night. While most people adjust to the change within a couple of days, night owls find it more difficult.
Spring Forward With Caution!
One study found a 6 percent rise in workplace injuries on the Monday after the daylight-saving time change. Traffic accidents rise 11 percent, following the time change too, so drive and work with extra caution the week of the time change.
9 Easy Ways To Help Your Body Adjust
- Get some sun! Allow sunlight into your room soon after you wake, to help “reset” your circadian rhythm.
- Coffee timing. Don’t drink caffeinated beverages after lunch.
- Plan your workouts. Exercise in the morning, afternoon or early evening, but not close to bedtime.
- Dim all the lights. Dim the lights indoors, an hour before bedtime. Make your bedroom as dark as possible.
- Unwind. Listen to soothing, relaxing music to unwind earlier in the evening.
- Take a bath! Try a warm soak in the tub before retiring. Add a few drops of a relaxing essential oil, such as lavender or mandarin to your bath water.
- Herbal tea time. Sip a warm cup of herbal tea to unwind. These herbal teas are noted to have a calming, relaxing, and stress relieving effect: Chamomile, Lemon Balm, Lavender, Catnip, and Hops. As with all herbs, seek advice from your natural health professional if you have allergies, other health conditions, or take medications.
- Try supplements. These natural supplements may help you relax and get to sleep: melatonin, magnesium, and valerian. Ask your health professional which is right for you.
- Hit the hay early. During the week leading up to the time change, go to bed 15 to 30 minutes earlier than usual, to help your body gradually adjust. If this isn’t possible, then make sure you don’t miss any sleep, no burning the midnight oil, this week.
Deborah Tukua
Deborah Tukua is a natural living, healthy lifestyle writer and author of 7 non-fiction books, including Pearls of Garden Wisdom: Time-Saving Tips and Techniques from a Country Home, Pearls of Country Wisdom: Hints from a Small Town on Keeping Garden and Home, and Naturally Sweet Blender Treats. Tukua has been a writer for the Farmers' Almanac since 2004.
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Deborah Tukua#molongui-disabled-link
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Deborah Tukua#molongui-disabled-link
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Deborah Tukua#molongui-disabled-link
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Deborah Tukua#molongui-disabled-link
Keep DST
It help my sad problem
I need the sun for my health!
I’d rather have the extra hour at the end of the day. I don’t know if it matters a whole lot to the farmers with daylight or no daylight, because most tractors I’ve seen have lights on them these days. That “extra” hour is when I’d be finishing up yard work.(you can’t exactly mow the grass in the dark.)
I’m with you
I really do not like the change. I wish this would stop. I do not think it is good for anyone. Seems to make a person up tight. It would be nice if they would not observe it.
A lady in our community (Murphy, NC) called into local radio talk show to voice her dislike of DST. She said the extra hour of daylight was killing her garden,
Now that’s one we haven’t heard!!!!
What???
There is no longer daylight. It just at the other end. I too hate it!
I suffer from sad so the extra hour of daylight is help to me
I love Wren’s sharing of a Native American’s take on this silly custom, but because
it is now so entrenched, my youngest brother offered a solution: spring forward one-
half hour this Sunday and then let that be the end of it.
slept good but im exhausted all day and could fall asleep as i write this,with this change but after adjusting i love it being light so late
try living over here in the UK where it starts getting dark at 10:30pm at the height of summer!!!! yet on the flip side in the winter it starts getting dark at 345pm at the height of winter……….. hummmm.
I LOVE DST! Look forward to the change every year. 🙂
One of the best things I have is a Full Spectrum light that I have by my desk in the morning. It helps me wake up more naturally. Wish we could stop playing with the clocks. As an Native American once said when it was explained to him, “Only a fool would believe that you can cut a foot of blanket off of the bottom, sew it back onto the top, and believe that the blanket is longer.”
why do we contne to do this pick one and staywith I all year good //
Myself I love DST and I wished it states that way I hated it getting dark at 6 or 7 I mean who wouldn’t really people heck I can adjust to it just fine so quit BITCHING.
Everything I’ve read on internet lately regarding time change has been negative. There is not one comment supporting daylight saving time. If most of us feel this way than what can we do to bring about a change?
The BEST way to adjust would be to get rid of it all together! Just pick one! 🙁 This custom has outlived its usefulness.
I found that LED lights, )from clock radios, “on” indicators on a TV, light from a laptop), can disrupt my sleep. Leaving the shades open allows too much light in my bedroom. Making my room as dark as possible & as quiet as possible has helped my sleep. I use certain breathing techniques from the Hatha and Kundalini Yoga disciplines to help my brain relax – and reduce list making! I drink a cup of herbal tea about 1 hour before I go to bed, this helps reduce the need to relieve myself an hour or two after I fall asleep. Acupuncture and theraputic massage have also helped me. Zzzzzzz Thanks for the other tips.
Why do we continue to do this? Pick one and stay with it all year!
I have a very hard time adjusting to the time change more and more each year. Even though I like the fact the daylight is longer, I feel so wiped and out extremly tired, exhausted even weeks before the time actually changes! It’s to the point I wish the law was changed to not observe it. I suffer, I think, from SADD. Each winter it gets worse, but the time change does not help either.
Great tips to help ease into the Spring Forward time change!