Interestingly, specifically timed light therapy may either advance or delay your sleep cycle, depending on when you use it. Prepare beforehand by installing a night light. For example, if you get up at night to go to the bathroom, do not turn on the light. So it is important to expose yourself to the light during the waking hours as much as possible - and don't expose yourself to bright light when it is dark outside. Light suppresses the secretion of the sleep-inducing substance melatonin. As mentioned, light is the principal environmental cue.And there are things you can to do make the daylight saving time transition easier. What can you do to reset your internal clock to adapt more quickly to the time changes? Your circadian rhythm is internally generated but is influenced by the environment, behavior, and medications. In this situation, you may well experience the worse performance, concentration, and memory common to sleep-deprived people, as well as fatigue and daytime sleepiness. If you are sleep-deprived already, getting by on six hours, you're probably in a bit of trouble, especially if you consume alcohol or caffeine close to bedtime. How will you feel during this transition? If you are getting 7-8 hours of sound sleep and go to bed a little early the night before, you may wake up feeling refreshed. But this can vary significantly among people. How long will it take you to adapt to time changes? Though a bit simplistic, a rule of thumb is that it takes about one day to adjust for each hour of time change. Going west, we fall asleep easily but may have a difficult time waking. An 'earlier' bedtime may cause troubleВ falling asleep and increased wakefulness during the early part of the night. It's similar to airplane travel traveling east we lose time. In general, 'losing' an hour in the spring is harder to adjust to than 'gaining' an hour in the fall. How well we adapt to this depends on several things. In doing so, our internal clock becomes out of sync or mismatched with our current day-night cycle. Moving our clocks in either direction changes the principal time cue - light - for setting and resetting our 24-hour natural cycle, or circadian rhythm. How time changes actually affect you depends on your own personal health, sleep habits, and lifestyle. But waking up Monday morning after the time change may not be so easy, having lost an hour of precious sleep and perhaps driving to work in the dark with an extra jolt of java. This effectively moves an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, giving us those long summer nights. The daylight-saving time change will force most of us to spring forward and advance our clocks one hour.

Clocks change