The end of Daylight Saving Time, when clocks go back an hour, may give you an extra hour of snooze time the next morning, but that's not likely to do you and your body any favors, sleep experts caution.
Unless you're a resident of Arizona, Hawaii or some U.S. territories, your clocks went back an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday, presenting you with a choice of waking up based on what you body tells you or on what your clocks say.
Opting for the extra hour in bed is likely to have an effect later, says Dr. Yosef Krespi, head of the New York Head and Neck Institute's Center for Sleep Disorders.
"It will hit you Sunday evening," he says. "But if your body clock is tuned to waking up with sunlight, you're going to benefit."
That's because our body clock, a grouping of neurons in our brains responsible for our roughly 24-hour sleep-wake cycle -- also called the circadian rhythm -- needs a daily reset signal.
Sunlight provides that signal, by shining into our eyes and correcting the cycle "from approximately 24 hours to precisely 24 hours," says Alfred Lewy, who heads the Oregon Health and Science University's Sleep and Mood Disorders Laboratory in Portland.
When our sleep-wake and light-dark cycles aren't lined up -- such as when we arbitrarily and artificially change the time on our clocks -- people can find themselves tired, irritable and out-of-sync, the experts say.
There are some tricks and tips that can lessen the impact of the time shift as we "fall back," they say.
Sleeping an hour later than you normally would on the morning after the time change can result in feeling less than alert as you start your week, they say, so it's better to wake up when you normally would and utilize the extra hour for a little light exercise or a healthy breakfast.
At the end of the day go to bed at your usual hour even though it will be getting dark an hour earlier than you've been used to, they say.
Oh, and public safety officials suggest you take the opportunity of the time change to put new batteries in your home smoke alarms, calling the biannual clock adjustment the perfect reminder event.
And if you have trouble adjusting to the hour added to you life, just remember that you'll be giving it back on March 8 of 2015.
