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Tips to Adjust to Daylight Saving Time

Emory docs offer advice

 

Daylight savings time means losing an hour of precious sleep this weekend.

But Emory University sleep expert sleep expert offers this advice to adjusting to Daylight Saving Time:

  • Keep a consistent schedule, arising at your usual time and going to bed at your usual time.  If you're tired, going to bed a few minutes earlier on Saturday night could be helpful. 
  • Be cautious driving to work on Monday morning.  Studies have shown that traffic accidents and fatalities spike on the Monday following the time change. Work place injuries also increase.
  • Light is the principal environmental cue for sleep and wakefulness, so expose yourself and your family to bright light, outdoors, on Saturday and Sunday.  Exposure to natural light when you first get up in the morning is one of the most powerful ways to increase alertness and re-set your circadian clock. 
  • Keep children on their usual schedule for sleeping, meals and naps.
  • Make sure everyone in the household, both parents and children, are getting enough sleep year round.

Remember to set your clocks one hour ahead at 2 a.m. Sunday morning for daylight-saving time.

Although we lose an hour of sleep this weekend, we gain an extra hour of sunlight for the spring and summer months.

Editor's note: This article first ran in spring 2012, but the advice still holds so we're re-running it.

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Related Topics: Daylight Savings Time

Anna Varela

8:04 pm on Friday, March 8, 2013

Do you have trouble adjusting to the time change?

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Mel White

3:29 pm on Saturday, March 9, 2013

The article says that you should expose your self to natural light when you first get up. The problem is that with DST we have to get up when it's PITCH BLACK DARK; there is no natural light. I wonder if using one of those special lights they recommend for people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (sic) would help.

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