Beat the Spring Forward Blues: Sleep Doc Says Ease into Daylight Saving Time

(KNSI) — Clocks spring forward on Sunday, but we can already prepare for the time change today.

Sleep specialist Dr. Abhinav Singh says the adjustment is hard on our bodies, but it can be helped by easing into it rather than getting hit suddenly with the equivalent of jet lag.

“The easy thing to do is like this; [a] 15 minute pullback of sleep time, right? Try 15 minutes every couple of days.”

Most health experts say it’s better to adopt standard time year round. “The farmers will get up and do their work when it’s light out, they don’t care. I feel it’s more of a commercial gain here. Businesses want to be open late, they want you out late, and therefore it makes commercial sense. But it does not make any sense at all from a health standpoint.”

Dr. Singh says in the week following the spring time change, scientific studies show increased traffic and workplace accidents. Doctors make more medical errors. Productivity drops, and heart attacks are higher than normal.

He says it is healthier to align the sun’s movements with our internal clock, and if we can’t move up bedtime by an hour, throttle back daylight exposure sooner on Saturday and Sunday and get in bed before we normally would.

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