Tired and cranky? Did you have to blast the kids out of bed HTC this morning? Sleep experts say you can blame the arrival of Daylight-Saving Time, our annual form of stay-at-home jet lag.
If you thought sleeping later on Sunday would carry you through the time change, well, wrong, according to internist Thomas Hobbins, director of the Maryland Sleep Disorders Center in Towson. Losing an hour of sleep is no small matter, especially after the weekend has already tinkered with your sleep habits.
"Many people always have trouble on Monday mornings because they've stayed up late and slept late for the past two or three days," Hobbins says. "If there's also a time change, these people are in big trouble."
Particularly if they're on the freeway. In a Canadian study reported last year, psychologist Stanley Coren found an 8 percent increase in the number of traffic accidents on the Monday after Daylight-Saving Time began. Similarly, there was a decrease in accidents on the Monday following the shift to standard time, the morning when motorists benefit from an extra hour of sleep.
Adjusting to an hour's time change at home is more difficult than when you're traveling, says Lynne Lamberg, author of "Body- rhythms: Chronobiology and Peak Performance."
"Daylight-Saving Time asks you to pay attention to the clock on
the wall and just pretend the sun has changed," she says. "But our bodies are still very much in touch with the natural world. Indoor light gives us the illusion of being in control, but it's the light and dark outside that really regulate our body rhythms. Sunlight regulates our sleep, body temperature, blood pressure, cell division and the times when we work at our best and at our worst."
She feels particular sympathy for parents, especially those with adolescents.
Teen-agers' body clocks are programmed to go to bed later and get up later.
"People who have to wake up teen-agers know it's almost impossible to get them out of bed two minutes earlier -- much less an hour," she says. "You can imagine what this time change is going to do to parents' mood this week, much less to teen-agers'."
Daylight-Saving Time was first used in Germany to conserve fuel during World War I. The United States introduced it in 1918 as an emergency wartime measure and abandoned it the next year.
