That one hour really does make a difference!
Tonight it’s that time again: winter time starts. This means that it will be a bit lighter in the morning in the near future, and it will get dark a lot faster in the evening. But it also means that your body may find it difficult to get used to that one hour difference. This is what the experts say about it.
Fatigue, poor sleep and a bad mood
You may think: oh well, one hour’s difference won’t make that much difference, right? But that can be quite disappointing. There are many people who are just as upset because of the clock shift.
Even though you can sleep an extra hour during winter time, it still causes fatigue, poor sleep and a bad mood for some people. This is because the hour disrupts our biological clock. According to British researchers, this has everything to do with ‘clock genes’, genes that influence our biological rhythm. The clock genes, which are responsible for our day and night rhythm, are controlled by the biological clock in your brain.
When the clock is moved forward or backward by an hour, the rhythm imposed on us no longer coincides with our biological clock and our clock genes. This causes a disturbance that you can notice physically. Your body is used to producing the sleep hormone melatonin around a certain time. When the clock is changed, the production of this sleep hormone is also disrupted. This can make it harder for you to sleep at night.
New rhythm
But there is good news for people who suffer from changing their clocks. Within two weeks everyone should be completely used to the new time. How can you speed up the process? Make sure you spend as much time outside as possible and adapt to the new rhythm immediately. Therefore, get up around the same time as always and take your meals around the same time. Then you will soon feel like your old self again!
Outdated
The question remains whether the annual shifting of the clock back and forth will continue to happen in the long term. For example, bright minds, prominent politicians and scientists worldwide have already called for this tradition to be abolished. It would be an outdated habit, dating from the time when we still depended on sunlight to do our work. The reasoning was that with more sunlight we would use less energy.
That time is of course behind us now, and so according to many, the clocks can simply remain set at one fixed time. Kenneth Wright, an expert in the field of sleep and the biological clock, explains that it would be better for our health to stick to one time: “We are essentially making the choice: do we want to follow the way we have evolved, or do we want to adjust that?” His choice is clear: we’d better do away with jumping through time. Who knows if it will ever happen!
Source: Marie Claire, Things for Women, ScienceNews.org | Image: Adobe Stock
