This Sunday at 2:00 AM, most of the country will set the clocks back an hour. For a lot of people, that means an extra hour of sleep.
For me, it probably means being wide awake at 4:45.
Here’s why: Monday through Friday, my alarm goes off at either 4:10 or 5:10 AM, depending on whether I’m coaching a 5 AM private session or starting with 6 AM group training. On Saturdays it’s set for 6:10, but I usually wake up on my own by 5:30 or 6:00 anyway. On Sundays I don’t set an alarm, and, like Saturdays, I’m typically awake before 6. Most nights I’m in bed between 8 and 9 PM.
After years of doing that, my body runs the schedule almost as much as my alarm does—I wake up a few minutes before it goes off almost half the time. So when the clock falls back this Sunday, my internal clock won’t. It’ll wake me at the usual time, which my phone will insist is 4:45.
(I’m not necessarily recommending a 4 AM alarm here—there’s legitimacy to the idea of chronotypes. What I’m describing is a schedule that doesn’t move much, and that works regardless of what the clock says or whether you’re a “morning lark”, a “night owl”, or something in between.)
How regular your sleep is may matter more than how long it is
I usually tell TNT members some version of the same thing about sleep: it’s highly underrated. Getting enough of it seems to help a lot of things that don’t look sleep-related (focus, weight management, willpower, even strength). You can do everything else right—train well, eat well, manage stress—and still struggle if your sleep is lousy. And keeping a consistent schedule seems to improve sleep quality. All of which is why the first sleep tip I wrote, back in 2023, was about keeping a consistent bedtime.
That advice came from both personal experience and discussions with others. But a 2024 study of about 61,000 adults put some actual numbers behind it.
Participants wore a wrist tracker for a week, the researchers scored how similar their sleep was from one day to the next, and then they followed everyone for about six years. Compared with the least regular fifth of participants, everyone else had roughly a 20–48% lower risk of dying during that time—and the more regular their sleep, the lower the risk. The regularity of participants’ sleep schedules also predicted that risk better than how long they slept.
A few important caveats:
- Results demonstrate a link, not proof. Irregular sleep may cause problems or simply be a sign of something else going on—the researchers said it could be both. The participants were also mostly middle-aged and older adults.
- Sleep length still mattered. Even with regularity accounted for, people who slept about seven hours or more had lower risk than those who slept less than six.
- You don’t have to be perfect. The biggest gap was between the least regular group—those in the bottom 20% of “sleep regularity”—and everyone else.
One more detail I found most interesting: the most regular group fell asleep and woke up within about a one-hour window on most days. The least regular group’s window was closer to three hours.
The researchers also made a point I appreciate as a coach (and that affected my recommendation below). Adding more hours of sleep is the typical health recommendation we hear, but it’s hard for a lot of people to pull off, so keeping the hours you already sleep at roughly the same times—that is, bedtime and wake-up time—may be the more realistic target. That matches what I see: jobs, kids, and the rest of life don’t change simply because we’d like more time in bed—but when we go to bed is usually more within our control.
Putting it into practice
As sleep regularity more closely correlated to lower mortality in the study than did sleep duration, developing greater consistency in your bedtime and wake-up time seems like a great place to start. But before you go there, you need a firm grasp on your current schedule. So…
Step 1: Find out what you’re actually doing. For the next week, weekend included, write down when you go to bed (lights out, not when you start getting ready or when you fall asleep) and when you get up. If you wear a smartwatch, you can pull last week’s times from it today. Either way, write out the numbers on paper. Patterns that hide in an app tend to jump out of a simple table. For example:
Less regular (bed | wake):
- Sun: 8:30 PM | 4:00 AM
- Mon: 10:15 PM | 5:00 AM
- Tue: 10:30 PM | 5:15 AM
- Wed: 9:00 PM | 5:00 AM
- Thu: 8:30 PM | 4:30 AM
- Fri: 11:30 PM | 7:45 AM
- Sat: Midnight | 8:00 AM
More regular (bed | wake):
- Sun: 8:30 PM | 4:10 AM
- Mon: 8:45 PM | 5:10 AM
- Tue: 9:10 PM | 5:10 AM
- Wed: 9:30 PM | 5:10 AM
- Thu: 8:50 PM | 4:10 AM
- Fri: 9:30 PM | 5:45 AM
- Sat: 10:00 PM | 6:05 AM
Step 2: Narrow the window. Calculate two gaps: between your earliest and latest bedtimes, and between your earliest and latest wake times. Particularly if either gap (or both) is in the three-hour range, pick a target bedtime and a target wake time (on the clock) that are somewhere between your extremes. (That might not be exactly between the extremes—choose a time that you think will work best with your idiosyncratic work and family schedule.) Then aim to get to bed and wake up close to those target times regardless of the day. Within 30 minutes either side (a one-hour window) is the goal; an hour either side is a fine place to start if your current gaps are closer to three hours.
As you almost certainly know from prior experience with Daylight Saving Time, your actual sleep time probably won’t change as quickly as flipping a light switch. But with enough intentional adherence, you’ll find that your body naturally adjusts. And that has the potential to meaningfully affect your health outcomes into the near and distant future.