Seattle Pike Place Market clock
The clock at Seattle’s Pike Place Market will have to be set manually after Sunday’s switch to daylight saving time. (Credit: Erik Stuhaug / Seattle.gov Imagebank)

Spring = forward. It’s a simple algorithm, but this weekend’s switch to daylight saving time can get complicated. The bottom line is that timepieces have to be pushed forward an hour in most (but not all) of North America.

Traditionally, clocks skip ahead an hour, from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. local time Sunday. Smartphones, computers and other connected devices should pick up the beat automatically. Old-school analog devices as well as standalone electronics such as microwave ovens will have to be set by hand, typically at bedtime on Saturday night.

But maybe there should be another way to think about all this, particularly because of 21st-century social trends.

Scientists say spring’s switch to daylight saving time is more of a strain today than it was a century ago, when it was instituted as a wartime energy-saving measure. Today, many of us lean toward going to bed later, and getting up later, too. That’s because we receive more exposure to artificial light during the evening from technologies that include television and smartphones, according to Daniel McNally, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at UConn Health.

“We didn’t have so much evening light exposure in ancient times,” McNally said in a news release. “As soon as it was dark, people went to bed. So this weekend, you will have to try to limit your exposure to evening light from technology and resist the tendency to stay up late, plus lose an hour of sleep.”

The potentially negative effect of losing sleep isn’t just psychological: Martin Young, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, notes that the move to daylight saving time has been linked to a 10 to 24 percent increase in heart attack risk on the following Monday, and a smaller effect on the day after that.

Daylight saving time infographic
An infographic from the University of Alabama at Birmingham focuses in on the health angle for daylight saving time.

In addition to putting down the smartphone early this weekend, McNally and Young suggest easing into the DST transition. If you’re used to sleeping in on Saturday morning, resist the temptation. Instead, get up 20 minutes earlier than your weekday norm. Then push your wake-up time 20 minutes later on Sunday, after the time switch. (This translates into 40 minutes earlier on standard time.) On Monday morning, wake up on time.

Here’s an example: If you typically get up at 7 a.m. on Mondays, set the alarm clock for 6:40 a.m. on Saturday. Change your clock if it needs changing on Saturday night, and set the alarm for 7:20 a.m. on Sunday. That will maximize your mood for Monday’s 7 a.m. wake-up. It almost goes without saying that you should shift your bedtime by the same increments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.

Eating a decent breakfast, and getting a healthy dose of fresh air, sunlight and exercise in the morning will also help.

“Doing all of this will help reset the central, or master, clock in the brain that reacts to changes in light/dark cycles, and the peripheral clocks — the ones everywhere else, including the one in the heart — that react to food intake and physical activity,” Young said in a news release. “This will enable your body to naturally sync with the change in the environment.”

Monday morning doesn’t mark the end of the DST transition: Much of the world is still on standard time, so if you’re dealing with customers in London, or developers in Beijing, there are more mental adjustments to make.

For example, Seattle goes from being eight hours behind GMT to seven hours. But London doesn’t make the switch to summer time until March 27, so the time gap shrinks to seven hours for the next two weeks, then returns to eight hours. Beijing is on year-round standard time, so that time difference grows from eight to nine hours.

Sydney gets really weird, thanks to Australia’s upcoming shift from summer time to standard time. Today, the difference is four hours. Starting Sunday, it’ll be five hours. And it’ll be six hours when Australia switches from summer time to standard time on the first Sunday in April. To sort all this out (including the situation for Arizona, Hawaii and Indiana), check TimeandDate.com.

Let’s hope that by April, you’ll be thoroughly settled into your wake/sleep routine — and good to go until standard time returns on the first Sunday of November.

For more about the mysteries of time and sleep, check out this interactive. The DST transition is also a good time to check your smoke alarm batteries.

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