How the Time Change Affects your Internal Clock

As the clocks fall back, don't let that extra hour of sleep get away from you. It's important to create healthy sleep habits to make the adjustment easier on your internal clock. Sabrina Brem is an instructor at Columbia University School of nursing. She explains what can happen if your body is not properly taken care of during this change. "Well there are a lot of possible health consequences that can result from the time change. People who already have insomnia will probably have a harder time adjusting than those who don't have insomnia. What a sleep disruption can do to your body is it produces more cortisol which actually can lead to cardiovascular diseases. It can also cause things like depression, or a weakened immune system, or overeating,” explains Sabrina Brem, FNP-BC, Columbia university school of nursing. Brem says usually people have a harder time adjusting to the time change in spring than in the fall, with more health risks in the spring too. "There is. There was a study done by the University of Alabama that shows that you can have a ten percent increase risk of heart attacks during actually in the spring time when you spring forward. Actually in the fall, it's the opposite where there's actually a decrease risk by about ten percent of heart attacks. So there's actually fewer consequences in the fall," explains Brem. For spring's time change, Brem recommends going to bed and waking up thirty minutes earlier.