Daylight Saving Time Ends This Weekend

Are you ready to “fall back”? Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends Sunday, November 2nd, at 2 a.m., when we turn the clock back to 1 a.m.

This small time shift can have a large impact on your body clock and health. Such effects are probably related to the body’s circadian rhythm, which regulates feelings of alertness or sleepiness. Light dictates your body’s production of melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone. When it’s bright out, you make less melatonin. When it’s dark, the body ramps up production and you feel tired.

The start and end of Daylight Saving Time can disturb sleep patterns. This can make people restless at night, which causes sleepiness the next day. Any loss of sleep will result in slower performance and reduced concentration and memory.

Daylight Saving Time and Health

When Daylight Saving Time ends (like this weekend), the incidence of heart attacks goes down.

But heart attacks spike during the first week of DST, according to a study in theAmerican Journal of Cardiology. That’s because losing an hour of sleep increases stress and provides less time to recover overnight.

Problems associated with Daylight Saving Time are the worst in early spring, when we have all just lost an hour of sleep. The sun rises later, making it more difficult to wake up in the morning. This is because we reset our natural clocks using sunlight.

Also during DST:

• There’s an association between sleep loss and an increased risk of being in a car accident, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study. Deadly car crashes decrease during DST.
• There was an uptick in suicides among Australian men in the first weeks of DST, according to research published by the journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms.
• Work accidents are more frequent and more severe, according to a study of miners published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Night after night of bad sleep is not just something you must live with. Find help with a North Shore-LIJ sleep specialist.

This post was written by Yosef Krespi, MD, associate director of North Shore-LIJ Health System’s head and neck services and director of the Center for Sleep Disorders at New York Head and Neck Institute.

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