Daylight Saving Time Affects Your Sleep

If you feel a little crazy this morning, you're probably not alone. If there is such a thing that people make watches after being released in the spring, they complain that they are tired.

Stuart Fogel, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah, where he worked in the sleep research lab. You have just lost an hour of sleep.

“The way that that takes place for most people at least is, they go to bed at their normal time and they change their clocks or their watches just as they go to bed or when they wake up in the morning,” he said. “And they find themselves a little bit sleep-deprived as a result.”

Now that he is running, it turns out that another person who is in good health when not tired has slow reaction times and is unable to cope with activities that require less concentration.

“There’s some literature showing that there are increases in accidents, workplace, motor-vehicle accidents and the severity of them is greater following the time change. And there’s research showing that even a small amount of sleep restriction, an hour or two, can have an impact on your ability to drive and things like that.”

Fogel says this is due in part to your “sleep architecture” – how your sleep progresses throughout the night.

At the beginning of the night, he said, you’re in a deep sleep. “This type of sleep is really important. Growth hormone is released then and it’s very important for physical health and physical restoration.”

In the second half of the night, you switch to a different kind of sleep. You experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is associated with dreaming. You also have spikes in brain activity that are important for learning and memory, as well as mood regulation and cognitive function, he said.

Getting up an hour early means that you cut into that second stage of sleep, and get less time to go through these mental processes. Although Fogel doesn’t think that losing an hour will affect your memory or mood regulation too much, he does think it will have an effect on your brain.