How to get your sleep schedule back on track after a time change | Canada Voices

On March 9, sleep expert Dr. Rébecca Robillard answered reader questions on how to have a better rest, which lifestyle factors affect your sleep and how to offset the impacts of the daylight time change – especially in B.C., which changed clocks for the last time and switched to permanent, year-round daylight saving time.

Dr. Robillard, PhD, is a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. She also leads clinical sleep research at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre and writes The Globe and Mail’s Sleep Whisperer column.

Readers asked about B.C.’s time-change decision, how it affects their health, and how to generally improve their sleeping habits. Here are some highlights from the Q&A.

B.C.’s shift to permanent daylight time

What’s your opinion on B.C.’s time-change decision? While it may make sense to stop switching times, it seems wrong to use daylight time as the default.

Dr. Robillard: This is indeed a complex question, but the science is very clear on this: We should keep permanent standard time. Standard time is actually the “real” time that follows the natural cycle of the sun. “Daylight Saving Time” (DST) is an artificial time that has been advanced, thereby depriving us of morning light. Under permanent DST, places like Vancouver will not get morning light until 9 a.m. in the winter, and up to 10:30 a.m. in northern B.C., which is indeed making it difficult to rise, may create more roadside accidents, make it more difficult for kids and especially teens to feel well and learn well in class.

Importantly, this also makes it more difficult for our internal biological rhythms (affecting most functions across the body such as heart rate, metabolism, hormone release) to get in sync with the 24-hour cycle of the sun (for most of us, our internal clock runs on a period a bit longer than 24-hour, and it’s really the morning light that brings back our clocks closer to 24-hour). This internal misalignment could have adverse health consequences, especially for vulnerable people such as kids and teens, older adults and people with chronic diseases.

What do you recommend to help with the effects of sunrise at 9:00 a.m. in the winter season?

Dr. Robillard: Indeed, all scientific organizations across Canada and internationally reached consensus that we should stop time change and keep permanent standard time all year around. A key reason is that permanent daylight time deprives us from morning light, which is critical for our body clock. To attenuate the effects, you could:

• Try supplementing your morning light exposure with artificial light (you need high intensity light, blue/green light may be especially helpful).
• Get some outdoor time to get some sunshine, even if later in the morning. Even taking a walk outside during a morning break at work could help.
• Try to keep constant rise/bedtimes, meal times and schedule some exercise in the morning if you can, all these are external cues to realign your body clock (a bit less powerful than light, but still helpful).

Why does the one-hour seasonal time shift affect people more severely than travelling into the next time zone for work or pleasure?

Dr. Robillard: When you travel to a different time zone, it does desynchronize your body clock. However, because you are exposed to light patterns that are coherent and match the new time at your destination, your body clock is better able to adjust (light is the most powerful synchronizer for our body clocks).

When we artificially change the time, the sun continues to do its thing … therefore, this creates a steady misalignment between the “time” and our light exposure which is not optimal for our body clock and doesn’t get corrected until we revert back to standard time in November (which B.C. is proposing not to do).

Improving your sleep health

When should I put my screens away to make sure I get quality sleep? I always find myself on my phone well into the late night.

Dr. Robillard: I would say at least one hour before going to sleep if you can, even two hours would be great. Reason is that your body starts secreting melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, about two hours before bedtime. Light suppresses melatonin and bright light in the evening shifts your sleep-wake cycle later, so exposing yourself to the light from your screens could prevent biological changes that are meant to be progressively getting your body and brain in the sleep zone.

Beyond that, our screens also typically involve not only light, but also engaging content; both from a cognitive and emotional perspective. This is, of course, not conducive to sleep. Further complexifying that are all the algorithms that are super-efficient to keep you engaged and scrolling at a time (evening) when the rational part of your brain is much less equipped to help you take and execute the decision to stop scrolling and close your phone. My advice would be to get back to good old books. Keep intensive screen time for the morning, when you actually need light and cognitive stimulation.

I find it harder to fall asleep now in my 70s than it was before. Is it more or less important to get eight hours of sleep a night as we age?

Dr. Robillard: Yes, sleep changes quite significantly as we age. We may not notice it, but it actually starts in your 40s. This may mean that your sleep shortens a bit. This could be very normal as long as you feel okay during the day. Good news is that we are also better able to cope with less sleep as we age, but within reasonable limits.

Yes, getting older changes your sleep. Here’s what you can do to help

How much can we rely on smartwatches to evaluate our sleep? How can we know if we are sleeping well?

Dr. Robillard: Most smartwatches are estimating sleep based on movements and sometimes heart rate monitoring. We have been doing this in research for decades.

For most devices, this is a decent estimate for certain rough metrics such as sleep duration and to some extent periods of wakefulness during sleep (which are totally normal, by the way!), but several sleep metrics are well-known to be much less reliable, such as how long it took you to fall asleep and how much time you spent in different sleep stages. That’s because people can either lie in bed still and be awake (then the watch thinks you are asleep) or be asleep and move a little (which may be coded as wake).

Also, importantly, sleep stages are defined based on a complex combination of biosignals covering brain activity, muscle tone and eye movements, so unless your device is directly measuring these biosignals, any sleep stage information it spits out would be based on pretty questionable assumptions.

If you get sleep metrics from simply your phone placed on the bed, underneath the pillow, this is totally esoteric. Also, general vague “sleep scores” are typically not founded in scientific evidence. All in all, you need to pay attention to the types of sleep metrics reported and what your device actually measures.

One critical thing is, how does this affect you? Is it helpful to make you more aware and positively proactive about your sleep or is it stressing you out?

Despite their popularity, sleep trackers don’t always lead to a better night’s rest

How can I prevent waking up much earlier than my alarm? It’s frustrating when I fall asleep at a decent time but still can’t get my full eight-nine hours because my body decides it’s time to wake up an hour or two before my alarm is set.

Dr. Robillard: I believe the key element here is how do you feel during the day after you have some of these earlier awakenings? If, after 30ish minutes of waking up, you feel reasonably awake and energized and you are able to function well during the day, I would say that this is a non-issue (and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!).

On average most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, but some people need less and some need more – and sometimes our body naturally calls for a bit more or a bit less depending on what happened on the previous night or the previous day.

Your brain has what we call a “homeostat” that is a system that naturally regulates the amount and depth of sleep that you need from one day to the other. So part of healthy sleep mindset is to trust your homeostat and let your body naturally get the sleep it needs on a given day.

If, however, this happens more than three times a week for over one to three months and it really impairs your ability to function during the day, then consider being assessed (we have a screening tool here) and treated for chronic insomnia. Here’s some more info.

I usually have no trouble falling asleep, but a few times a year I’ll have a night where I can’t fall asleep until 3-4 a.m., seemingly for no apparent reason. The longer I can’t fall asleep, the more anxious I get about how little sleep I’ll get, which makes it even harder to fall asleep. What should I do when these random bouts of insomnia strike?

Dr. Robillard: Insomnia is actually a normal natural phenomenon that affects most people at some stage in their life. What really matters is how we react to the occasional bad night.

Here are a few hints to prevent this cycle to spiral down:

• Keep realistic expectations: Bad sleep happens, this is part of human experience!
• Know that your sleep systems will naturally recover and let them do their job: When you have a (or a few) bad night(s), you may not always notice it, but your brain will produce more deep sleep in your next sleep episodes to recover (we don’t “catch up” with more sleep, but with deeper sleep. This happens naturally, you do not need to “do” anything.)
• Stay patient: sometimes we have a few bad nights in a row, it does not mean that all is doomed, we may just be going through a rough patch.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.