Advice | As a time change looms, here are tips and apps for better sleep

Sometimes it feels like the worst thing about the time change is having to listen to everyone complain about the time change.

The second-worst thing, though, is almost certainly the fact that, the older we get, the harder the time change is to cope with. In, say, university, it was easy enough to survive an all-nighter spent writing a last-minute term paper. A couple of decades later and even an hour’s time change can disrupt our waking schedule for days on end.

“Disruptive sleep habits that can form patterns start to happen younger in life,” says Dr. Mandeep Singh, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, University of Toronto. “When we’re young, we have our body reserve and we can manage with a certain amount of sleep disruption and we can compensate for it but, as we get older, we start to appreciate the true value of optimal sleep health, as we start experiencing symptoms of fatigue, daytime sleepiness and poor health outcomes.”

For most people, these problems have become worse since the pandemic began. Singh’s research specifically looks at the impact of the pandemic on health care workers, many of whom are faced with even more shift work, which has an impact on health. Outside of health care, though, the change in how many people live and work over the past year and a half has been disrupting sleep patterns, too. Singh says more people are working erratic hours at home late into the night, are spending more time on devices and, in general, getting less time outside in natural light, which is key to regulating melatonin.

The last thing most of us need right now is another disruption, like setting the clocks back. Especially since studies have linked setting the clocks back (or forward) to an elevated risk for car accidents, work accidents, insomnia and mental health problems.

So, is there anything we can do to lessen the impact the change has on our bodies? There are plenty of strategies but one that’s becoming more commonly prescribed is bedtime meditation, both as part of an overall mindfulness program and as a stand-alone practice.

“There’s a lot of evidence now that meditation and deep breathing exercises, like the ones within yoga that are called the pranayama, can be useful and help with relaxation and winding down to improve sleep quality,” explains Singh. “And, generally speaking, mindfulness has been shown to decrease the level of stress and distress that people feel at any time of the day.”

Aside from mindfulness apps, there are plenty of online resources for relaxation music, deep breathing and bedtime meditation. One of the more popular YouTube sleep meditation channels is Jason Stephenson, founder of Relax Me Online Australia , so I decided to give it a shot when I couldn’t get back to sleep in the middle of the night. I relaxed quickly and started to doze off but had to shut it off early, because I started to worry that whatever the next video in the YouTube lineup was would be Norwegian Death Metal or something and would jar me out of the zen state and wake me up. Even though I didn’t finish the video, though, which was essentially a pretty standard body scan, it did work.

Why does this kind of meditation work so well? A lot of it has to do with the breathing, which is really the anchor for most relaxation techniques, since it helps activate our parasympathetic nervous system, says Greg Wells, a PhD and author of “Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide for Optimizing Your Life.”

“Your sympathetic nervous system, which connects your brain to your body, is kind of like a light switch and, when you turn it on, you activate the system and get ready to perform,” explains Wells, a sleep expert and consultant. “The other nervous system is the parasympathetic system that sort of dims the lights and helps you rest, recover and regenerate.”

In addition, both experts advise using a range of strategies to help you adjust to this twice-annual disruption to our circadian rhythms. Wells has a nighttime protocol that you can find on his website (drgregwells.com), that actually starts in the afternoon when he stops drinking coffee and, later on, involves turning off screens, spending time with the family and gratitude journaling. And Singh suggests wading into the time by setting your alarm later by 15 minutes per day for the four days before the clocks go back on Sunday. (And vice versa for the spring forward change.)

“Simple things help a lot when it comes to sleep so try blackout curtains, ear plugs and natural lighting with dimmers, blue blockers, night-shift mode on devices can help with winding down strategies just before bedtime,” advises Singh. “These are all small things but, brought together, they go a long way.”

Singh and Wells both also agree that it’s more important now than ever, both for health care workers and everyone else.

“I think in our current world, in this 20 month-long pandemic, and being inundated with various stressful headlines, we need to take some time to pump the brakes and to recover and regenerate deliberately at least daily,” says Wells. “That could be reading, taking a hot bath, reading fiction or meditation and mindfulness training.”

He adds: “I take some time for myself and use it for just a few minutes every day and it makes a huge difference when you do it.”