The clocks go back: how to help your body adjust

The Sunday the clocks change is a slightly strange day. The morning feels generously long, and then darkness arrives while you are still in the middle of something. Your body takes rather longer than the clock to accept the new arrangement.

The clocks go back on the night of Saturday 24 to Sunday 25 October 2026, at 2am in the UK. Here is the one sentence answer: this is not an hour of sleep gained but an hour of light moved, so the way to help your body adjust is to hold your usual wake time for a week and get outside in daylight late in the day, because it is light rather than the clock that resets your rhythm.

What to do, step by step

The extra hour is smaller than advertised

It is the one consolation of autumn: an extra hour in bed. The data tells a more modest story.

An analysis published in the Journal of Sleep Research (2025) used accelerometers worn by 11,780 UK Biobank participants across the two weeks around the clock changes. On the Sunday of the autumn transition, mean sleep duration was 33 minutes higher than on the Sunday before, with a confidence interval of 27 to 39 minutes.

Thirty-three minutes, not sixty. The comparison was made between different groups of people on each Sunday rather than by following the same individuals, which the authors flag as a limitation of their own work. The order of magnitude is clear enough: the hour exists on the clock and does not fully arrive in the night.

What actually shifts is the light

Your internal clock cannot read numbers. It reads the alternation of light and dark, and it takes several days to resettle when that alternation jumps by an hour overnight.

A paper in Scientific Reports (2024) examined this using a mathematical model of the human circadian pacemaker. The authors conclude that changes in evening light exposure can be the main driving force behind re-entrainment, and that people with a later chronotype resynchronise more slowly. Above all the model predicts large differences between individuals: the same week does not cost everyone the same.

This is a model rather than an experiment on volunteers. It points a direction rather than handing over a recipe, and the direction is simple: daylight matters more than discipline.

Why the evenings get heavier than the mornings

When the clocks go back, the morning brightens and the evening darkens, both at once. It is the second half that people notice. Night now falls in the middle of the working afternoon, and your body receives the evening signal with hours of the day still to go.

Tiredness turns up earlier, your eyes open earlier the next morning, and none of that is a malfunction. It is an internal rhythm still running on last week's time for a few more days.

What helps in that particular hour is not resisting the early tiredness but keeping it from swallowing the whole evening. A few minutes of lengthened out-breath before bed helps the body settle, and many people find sleep arrives more easily than it does after a struggle.

What this does not replace

A few unsettled days around the clock change is ordinary. If your sleep is still disorganised weeks later, if drowsiness is affecting your driving, or if your mood drops and stays down as the days shorten, this is no longer about adjusting and it deserves medical advice. Sophrology supports wellbeing; it does not replace care or treatment.

In Soa, the evening sessions follow the same movement: a voice slows the breath, then walks your attention through the body until the day closes on its own. You can try a rhythm with the breathing timer, or see how the method handles periods of transition.