How to beat daylight savings fatigue

Good news for the early risers

Next weekend, another six months of daylight savings will come to a conclusion. Here’s what an expert recommends as we all prepare our watches, clocks and sleep schedules for the shift. 

If you’re based in Queensland, the Northern Territory or Western Australia, your clocks, watches and phones can all rest easy this weekend.

For the rest of us, Sunday the 6th of April marks the end of Daylight Savings time, seeing our clocks turning back an hour at 3 AM. 

While the shift will mean slightly lighter mornings for the early risers, we’ll all experience shorter stretches of daylight after work – until the winter darkness settles in for good.

And though the winding back of clocks this weekend will give most states an extra hour of sleep, any change as significant as this is sure to leave us all feeling out of whack for a few days.

How can we avoid messing up our sleep routine?

As Moira Junge, CEO of The Sleep Health Foundation explains, this coming shift is far less detrimental to our sleep schedules than the commencement of daylight savings in October. 

“My main advice would be to not really overthink it,” she says. “Most people are grateful for the extra hour of sleep, and there’s not much to prepare for.”

If an extra hour of sleep is enough to rock your routine, Junge recommends slightly adjusting your bedtime on Saturday night to coincide with your refreshed Sunday wake-up alarm. Otherwise, Junge says it’s best to stick to your usual bedtime and listen to your body’s natural cues. 

Tiny children might take longer to 'get the memo' this weekend. Image: Pexels

Sunday sleep-in vs. seizing the day

The most noticeable effect of Sunday’s shifted clocks will be the extra light in the mornings, something Junge and the experts at the sleep foundation recommend we make the most of. 

“We encourage people to get out in the light and enjoy the natural, correct time, not the time that’s altered by an hour for the summer months,” she says. “For example getting up at 6 AM will now be what we knew as 7 AM but it will now be daylight.”

Of course, if you live with tiny roommates, any change to bedtime or wakeup time can feel especially painful. 

“With small children, it can be frustrating that they ‘don’t get the memo’ that there’s an extra hour to be obtained, so parents get ready to just roll with it, they will adapt within a few days,” Junge says. 

Overall, the sleep expert explains most of us should only feel ‘out of whack’ for a few days before we adjust to the new, natural timezone.

Originally published as How to beat daylight savings fatigue