What must we do to beat the effects of Daylight Saving Time (DST)? DST has always been a challenge for families with children, especially the little ones. Adjusting to the time changes means adjusting all our activities too including our sleep time patterns, of which most kids has the hard time doing. Then, there’s other things that need to be remembered like, turning the clock one hour forward, changing batteries of smoke and alarm detectors, check fire extinguisher makes sure it is working.
Sleep Number suggested some tips to follow to help us. These tips and points are based on their sleep survey on how to beat the changes cause by an hour of less sleep. It might just be one hour but it can disrupt your day and activities big time when not in tune with the change. According to the Sleep Number National Sleep Survey, more than half or about 54 percent of those who were survey said, they don’t perform well when they don’t get enough sleep. So, an one hour less of your usual sleep time will definitely have an impact to your productivity.
Here are some of the things that you can do to beat the effect of DST as suggested by the Sleep Number Blog:
- Move Ahead of Time. Before the DST in effect start your waking time like it was already the regular DST. Do not eat or drink caffeinated food close to dinnertime. Because caffeine wears-off after 6 hours or so. If you are like me that need coffee at the start and end of the day, make sure that your day ends before noon. I do not give highly energized food like sweets to our kids so they don’t stay up late.
- Turn-Off Electronics Early. Many recent studies suggest that having electronics near you or your bed will impede or shortened your hour sleep because you will be disturbed by the light and the sound of in-coming messages. We are one of those families who cannot get away with this. We even have television in our bedroom because we want to multi-task, while doing some computer work or checking our social media accounts before bedtime, we want to get the latest update of weather and late night news. This is a big offender that we need to give-up at least for a while to be able to synchronize our sleep habit.
- Exercise with Bright Light to Sleep Tight. Some studies suggest that exposure to sunlight will help regulate the rhythm of body temperature and make you adjust more to the changes of your sleep pattern. Exercise only during daytime, because when exercise done late at night or near bedtime tendency is body to not have enough time to relax and cool down which makes sleep harder to achieve.
- Comfy Bed to a Better Sleep. Men and women have different preferences when it comes to choosing beds. Sleep Number, offers the bed that guaranteed a good night sleep for you. When your body is relax, you will also wake up relax and energized and ready to do your days activity.
- Early Sleeper, Early Riser. Study suggest, by going to bed 15 minutes earlier than the normal sleeping pattern and waking-up 15 minutes early too but still get the regular number of hours sleep will not deprive your body of it. Do this for 2-3 days while eventually adjusting to the 1 hour sleep changes. This is one of the techniques we normally do for our children, but we do 30 minutes. We do this at least 2 weeks before the start of DST for them to have longer time to adjust to the changes in time pattern. We slowly adjust their sleeping and waking time.
There are many more techniques that you can employ, depending on your routine and what makes you comfortable. Do everything in moderation. Do not right away do the big change or you will end up tired, groggy and dead beat before you can even start your day. This applies to the entire family. Slow but constant change is better than hasty one.
**Disclosure: I am working with Sleep Number on the post.