How to Adjust Your Body to Darker Days, According to Experts

Fact checked by Nick Blackmer

• Many people feel “winter blues” during the season of darker, colder days which is prompted by early November’s transition from daylight savings time to standard time.

• According to experts, it can take people about a week to adjust to the changed clocks.

• Experts recommend regular exercise, consistent sleep habits, and light boxes to combat the effects of shorter days and less daylight.

This past Sunday, Americans experienced the first late-afternoon sunset of the season, after the clocks switched from daylight saving time back to standard time.

Beyond the earlier sunset, the clock change also signals wintertime’s shorter days.

Online, people are already bracing for limited daylight by sharing tips on how to beat the “winter blues,” a general term for feeling more down when it’s darker and colder outside.

Both the transition between daylight saving and standard time and the short days in the winter can affect people’s health, experts say.

From issues with circadian rhythm to more serious mental health issues such as seasonal affective disorder, early sunsets are often associated with undesirable health consequences.

“It can take about a week for you to adjust to this,” Aarti Grover, MD, medical director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Tufts Medical Center, told Health.

Changing certain lifestyle habits can make this transition and the following winter season easier, she explained. However, feeling off consistently when there’s little light is a sign of a bigger problem.

“You can’t just blame everything on the clock,” Grover said. ‘You don’t want to forget other things that might be affecting your mood and how you’re adjusting to darker days.”

Here’s how daylight affects the body, and how to best adjust to earlier sunsets during the winter months.

How Can Changing Clocks Affect Our Health?

Though most Americans prefer daylight saving time, many health experts agree that it’s better for people to be on standard time.

“It aligns—for most people—with a more natural circadian rhythm,” Oren Cohen, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the department of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Health.

Whereas daylight saving time pushes the clock back for more sunlight in the evenings, standard time reverts to a normal clock schedule, with more light in the mornings.

Morning light and evening darkness are what the body needs to wake up and fall asleep, respectively.

“We’re forced to wake up for school and for work at a certain time,” said Cohen. “And for optimal sleep health, you want early morning exposure to light.”

And while many dislike the earlier sunsets that come with fall's transition from daylight savings time to standard time, it's better for overall well-being than the opposite transition that happens in the spring.

“Changing standard time is kind of like getting jetlag for an hour,” said Kenneth Lee, MD, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at UChicago Medicine. “Reverting to standard time is actually easier to do for most people.”

Even though switching back to standard time tends to be healthier—and typically means an extra hour of sleep—the very act of changing the clocks biannually isn’t great for people’s health.

“Already, there are a lot of people that have issues modulating their circadian rhythm, or aligning their circadian rhythm with their sleep cycle,” Cohen said. “Anytime we’re adjusting the clock, it’s sort of a vulnerable period for a lot of people who have difficulty already trying to keep a consistent sleep schedule.”

Related: Is Daylight Saving Time Ending? How the Sunshine Protection Act Could Impact Health

For Some, Adjusting to Darker Days Is More Difficult

Even though the return to standard time is better in general for people’s circadian rhythm and sleep, earlier sunsets and darker days in the late fall and winter can have negative consequences for certain people.

“Typically, people who are prone to seasonal affective disorders, they can be affected more during these months [with] shorter or darker days,” said Grover. “Due to lack of sunlight, we can experience a decrease in the hormone, or a chemical in our brain, called serotonin, which is our feel-good chemical.”

Vitamin D—which people primarily get from sunlight—helps the body regulate serotonin and melatonin, which helps the body fall asleep.

Researchers have suggested that for people with winter-pattern seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a lack of sunlight could be driving either too-low serotonin levels or too-high melatonin levels.

People with wintertime SAD typically experience symptoms like persistent sadness or anxiousness, feelings of hopelessness, fatigue, oversleeping, social withdrawal, and overeating.

This is typically more common in people who already have mood disorders like anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder, experts said.

The adjustment to wintertime darkness might also be harder for people who have a “delayed sleep phase,” or those who prefer to go to bed and wake up late, Cohen added, as they’ll experience fewer hours of sunlight than early birds.

It’s fairly common for people to just feel a bit lower during darker days—a 2022 poll found that almost 40% of Americans say their mood declines during the winter. These “winter blues” are not SAD, but can still affect people’s overall wellbeing when it gets dark.

“This doesn’t really have to do with standard time in particular, but the days being shorter in general,” said Lee, “it has its effects on the body, in terms of mood and depression.”

Related: How Light Exposure Throughout the Day Affects Your Mental Health

Managing Early Sunsets and Darker Winter Days

It’s very normal for people to take a few days to adjust to the changed clocks.

“It does take some time for people to get used to the time switch to standard time,” said Lee. “Most people can adjust within a few days, some people it could be even longer.”

That said, there are changes that people can make to help ease into the transition of shorter days, experts say.

Light boxes can be an artificial way to get more sunlight, and people can talk to their doctor to see if they might “help improve mood, help improve seasonal affective disorder, and to help adjust to the earlier time,” Cohen said.

But natural light is still the best, he clarified. If possible, it’s best to get outside for 15 to 30 minutes after waking up to get some exposure to natural light.

Additionally, exercise is crucial during the winter months, even if it’s harder to find the motivation to move. Cohen explained that exercise promotes good sleep and can release endorphins which are also helpful for beating wintertime changes in mood.

The most important thing to do is to maintain a consistent sleep schedule, Grover said.

“Just like setting an alarm to wake up, I think it’s also important to try and set an alarm to go to sleep, or at least a time to start that wind-down period prior to going to bed,” Cohen added.

And though darker days carry a risk of worse mental health for some people, Lee and Cohen emphasized that standard time and dark evenings aren’t all bad.

In the summer “it can be difficult to get to bed because of this natural outdoor exposure to light,” Cohen said. “I think that can be a positive, the fact that the sun is setting earlier. It should clue people into, ‘Well, this is a time, this is a period of the year for me to really reset my sleep habits.’”

That said, if sleep or mood problems continue to linger for weeks or months past the traditional transition time, it’s best to get a psychologist, sleep specialist, or other healthcare professional involved, Lee and Cohen said.

“People are going to be affected by this on an individual basis,” said Cohen. “People need to have a health and wellness plan [...] because it can be a very difficult time for a lot of people.”

Related: 8 Ways To Cope With Seasonal Affective Disorder

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