How to Survive Daylight Saving Time
10:27 Share

Hey, it's Rosie from The Wirecutter Show, and this is a special bonus episode called How to Survive Daylight Saving Time. This coming Sunday, March 9th, marks the start of Daylight Saving Time, or DST, the time of year we spring ahead and advance our clocks forward one hour.

We spend the majority of our year in DST and will be in DST all the way to November when we revert back to standard time. For most people, these biannual time changes are simply part of life, minor inconveniences. But there's a bit more to it than that. Scientists and researchers have studied the effects of time change into DST and found it can negatively impact our health.

Kyra, the co-host of our show, has reported on sleep hygiene and, in particular, the things you can do to prepare your body for the time shift and some tips on how best to adjust. I'm going to talk with her all about it after a quick break. We'll be right back. This is Somini Sengupta. I'm a reporter for The New York Times.

I've covered nine conflicts, written about earthquakes, terror attacks, droughts, floods, many humanitarian crises. My job is to bear witness. Right now, I'm writing about climate change, and I'm trying to answer some really big and urgent questions about life on a hotter planet. Like, who is most vulnerable to climate change? Should we redesign our cities? Should we be eating differently? What happens to the millions of people who live by the coast as the oceans rise?

To make sense of this, I talk to climate scientists, inventors, activists. Mostly, I document the impact of global warming. And that impact is highly, highly unequal. My colleagues and I are doing our best to answer complicated questions like these, but we can't do that without our subscribers. If you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com slash subscribe. And thank you.

Hello, Kyra. Hi. Kyra, I understand we're about to head into your least favorite part of the year. Yeah, I really don't like this part of the year, which is when we start Daylight Saving Time. And it starts on March 9th at 2 a.m. local time this year.

So the saying is spring forward, fall back. That means we're going to be losing an hour of sleep right when daylight savings starts, right? Right. But it's actually worse than that. Some people kind of look forward to this time because the evenings are brighter and that's kind of fun in the summer especially, but it does come at a cost.

Studies have shown that even something as slight as a one-hour time shift can disrupt our circadian rhythms, which is basically just our body's internal 24-hour clock that follows the sun. This can lead to jet lag-type symptoms, and that's just because your body clock isn't aligning with the social clock. So basically, your phone will say that it's 3 p.m., but our bodies know it's actually 2 p.m. And this mismatch can lead to a number of health issues.

You might feel it when you have a hard time falling asleep or a hard time waking up in the morning. But after the spring shift specifically, according to the National Institutes of Health, car accidents, heart attacks and certain kinds of strokes spike during this time.

So the natural next question is why do we do this to ourselves? I mean, for all these years, I just do it and assume that this is part of everybody's life. But why? I mean, it's not like we the individuals are doing it. But something that you might have heard is that farmers need it. But that's actually not true. Daylight saving really benefits big corporations. It's about, you know, gas costs.

companies, golf clubs and gardening tools being sold more because people are outside in the summertime spending money. So it's all about capitalism. But farmers actually notoriously hate daylight saving because it's completely opposed to their schedules, which follows the sun as our body should be doing. Right, right, right. So we actually get 4.5 months of standard time, which is the actual right time.

And then almost eight months of daylight saving. So that's so much more time in DST. And most people think that this time shift twice a year is, you know, at worst, annoying and confusing. You figure you gain an hour of sleep in the fall, even though it gets dark in the evenings, but then you get longer days in the summer.

But actually, daylight saving is pretty bad for us year-round. A 2024 study found that standard time, which is what we're leaving right now to enter daylight saving time, is the optimal choice for health and for safety. Following the sun, essentially. So it can feel like you're trying to pull yourself through severe jet lag. And it's so hard for me to fall asleep at a reasonable time around the shift.

So as we're getting ready to prep for this time shift, what is your best advice to help people get to bed at a reasonable hour and sort of mitigate some of these efficiencies?

So let's say you usually go to bed by 10 p.m. You want to start shifting your routine on Wednesday before the shift that happens that Sunday morning. So that would be tomorrow in this case. You got to get on it. And all you're going to do is just shift in 15 minute increments starting on Wednesday. So your body is ready to sleep by 9 p.m. that Saturday before the time switch happens. And you just do that in 15 minute increments every day.

And the same goes for your eating schedule, too. So if you're going to be going to sleep earlier, that means you need to eat a little bit earlier so your body isn't trying to digest that food as you're trying to wind down because that will keep you up.

It also might seem like common sense, but don't do things like drink caffeine or alcohol before going to bed. Especially caffeine, you want to give yourself at least six hours to fully digest that before you start your wind down routine. So a lot of this stuff is guidance for good sleep hygiene in general. Yeah. And also it seems aligned with how you might try and shift to

to adjust to a new time zone if you're going on vacation or you're moving somewhere. Totally. And every expert that I've talked to about basically just how to have a healthy sleep routine, their biggest advice is just to get a good sleep routine. And then it's much easier to help modify or adjust it as needed.

And then if you're just having a really hard time falling asleep earlier in general, there are a couple of hacks that you can use to kind of trick your body into winding down for the night. What do you got? One that I use every single night that my partner hates is temperature regulation. So the optimal sleep temperature is between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit. No way. Yeah, it's cold. That seems really low. It's cold. I'm not even gonna lie. But then when you get into your bed and it's all warm and you have the right covers, it's kind of nice. I enjoy it now.

But that temperature range has been proven to signal to your body that it's time to shut down and it will start to do that. Another thing that you can do to jumpstart that is if you take a warm shower at night, when you get out that shower again, your body temperature will drop and that will also signal to your body that it's time to go to sleep.

Something else that is really beneficial during this time is light regulation. So you want to kill as much light as possible in the early evenings so you're not staying awake later into the night. And then when you wake up in the morning, because, you know, it's so dark in the beginning of daylight saving time, you just want to get as much sunlight as possible as soon as possible. So blackout curtains are really helpful for keeping that light out. And then when you wake up, just open them up, get some sun. Flood your place with sun. Mm-hmm.

If you don't want to go out and buy blackout curtains, I get it. If you have an eye mask laying around or even like a dark T-shirt would work. And we'll throw links to the eye mask and blackout curtain recommendations in our show notes. Mm-hmm.

And then everybody knows this at this point, even if we don't follow it, myself included. But try to limit devices at night because the blue light, again, signals to your brain that it's wake up time, not go to sleep time. So that means, you know, your TV, your laptop, your cell phones, they all emit this blue light that is keeping your brain awake. So try to kill that as much as possible. What my kids call waking up time. Is it waking up time? Oh, that's cute. Or in the evenings, is it time for nap?

So again, a lot of this guidance really is general sleep hygiene guidance, but really becomes even more important when you're trying to adjust your body to experience this time shift away from the sun's clock. Yeah. So what about when you wake up? I mean, beyond...

getting the sun in there as boldly as possible. I'm worried it's going to feel impossible to get my kids out of bed in the morning when it's still dark. Never mind myself. No, it is really hard to fight that early morning grogginess because it's so dark. So I live in a basement apartment. My bedroom is in the basement. And something that I use year round is a sunrise alarm clock to basically just simulate warm sunlight in my room when I'm waking up in the morning. I like the hatch, but our official pick is the Philips alarm clock.

And then also, you know, this isn't the sun, but turn on the lights. Get up out of bed. Put your phone alarm somewhere far so you have to get out of bed to go turn it off. Anything to signal your brain that the lights are on. It's day. Yeah. It might not feel like day in your body, but it is day. Exactly. Anything to tell your body to go get it.

This is a bit too far even for me, but if you can get out into the sun and do something active, that is the best thing you can do for your body during this time. Go for a run, do some yoga next to a window, just anything to really get your body moving and like signaling again that it's time to start your day.

low hanging fruit. Maybe you could walk out if you have a balcony, if you have a front door, stepping out with your morning coffee just to sort of get yourself flooded with a little bit of sun is going to, again, help signal your brain and your body that it's morning, it's time to rock. Exactly. Okay. So Kyra, if you could recommend one thing, just one thing that is going to help pull people through this shift.

What is it going to be? I mean, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's light, light, light. Block it at night. Get it in the morning. Love it. All right, Kyra, thanks for the tips. Of course. Next time we meet, I think we're going to talk about vacuums. I'm excited. Stay tuned. If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage on Daylight Saving Time, or if you want to check out the products Kyra recommended today, go to nytimes.com slash Wirecutter, or you can find a link in the show notes.

wishing you a peaceful transition into daylight saving time. Thanks so much for listening. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alicia Baetube, and Diane Wong.

Wirecutter's deputy publisher and general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. Thank you for listening.