The clocks go back on 25 October: how to use the extra hour instead of losing a week to it

At 2am on Sunday 25 October the clocks go back and the country gets an hour it did not have. Most people spend it badly. Surveys consistently find that around a third of British adults feel worse rather than better in the week after the autumn change, with more early waking, more afternoon slumps and a measurable rise in low mood as the evenings go dark. The extra hour is real; the problem is that the body does not know what to do with it.

“The autumn change is easier than the spring one, but easier is not the same as easy,” said Dr Helen Carver, a sleep physician at a hospital in Sheffield who runs a clinic for shift workers. “Your body clock does not shift by an hour overnight. It shifts by about 20 minutes a day, if you give it the right signals. If you don’t, you spend a week waking at 5am wondering why.”

The standard advice, which Carver says is sound, is to split the hour. Starting on Thursday, go to bed and get up 15 to 20 minutes later each day so that by Sunday you have absorbed the change without a jolt. That works best for people with flexible mornings. For those with fixed starts, children or dogs, she suggests simply keeping the old wake time on Sunday and Monday, which means getting up at what feels like 6am and is now 5am, and using the quiet hour for light.

Light is the lever that matters most. The body clock is set largely by morning daylight, and the autumn change moves sunrise an hour earlier, which is the one genuine gift of the week. “Get outside before 9am for the first three or four days,” said Carver. “Twenty minutes with no sunglasses. It is worth more than any supplement.” The flipside is that evenings darken early, and the usual guidance on screens applies with more force: dim the house after 8pm, keep the phone out of the bedroom and resist the urge to use the dark to go to bed at 9pm, which brings on the 5am waking that people complain about.

Eating and exercise shift too. A study of 1,900 adults published last year by a Surrey research group found that people who moved their evening meal 30 minutes later over the change week reported fewer sleep disruptions than those who kept to the clock. Exercise in the morning rather than the evening for the first week, and if you drink caffeine, stop by 2pm; its half-life is around five to six hours and the change compresses the window.

For a minority the autumn change is the start of something longer. GPs see a rise in appointments for low mood from late October, and anyone who has had seasonal depression in previous years should treat the change as the cue to start a light box, if they use one, rather than waiting until December. “The people who do worst are the ones who wait until they feel bad,” said Dr Carver. “By then the clock has already moved and you are chasing it.”

Children, for what it is worth, adjust faster than adults; the under-fives will simply wake at the old time and there is nothing to be done but accept it for a few days. The dog is the same. The adults in the house, with a plan and some daylight, can do better.