---
title: The Clock Went Back. Help Your Body Adjust to the One-Hour Shift
description: The clocks went back on 25th October. Here is how the one-hour shift affects your sleep, mood and appetite, and eight ways to reset your body clock.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-25T10:56:21.732Z
updated: 2026-10-25T10:56:21.750Z
canonical: https://richhealthmagazine.com/article/clocks-go-back-body-clock
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-17160708.webp
categories: Health & Strength
content_type: Feature
region: United Kingdom, Europe
publication: Rich Dad Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

At 2am on Sunday 25th October, every phone in Britain slipped back to 1am, and most of continental Europe made the same switch at the same moment. The extra hour in bed felt like a gift. By Monday afternoon, with the light draining from the sky before 5pm, it may feel more like a bill.

Your phone made the change in a fraction of a second. Your body runs on clocks of its own, and they move far more slowly.

## Your brain keeps a master clock and your organs keep dozens more

Deep in your brain, just above the point where the optic nerves cross, sits a cluster of around 20,000 nerve cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It works as your master clock, setting a roughly 24-hour rhythm for sleep, body temperature, blood pressure, hormone release and alertness. Light entering your eyes is the main signal it uses to stay in step with the sun.

Your liver, gut, pancreas, muscles and fat tissue each keep their own time as well, and they take their cues less from light than from when you eat, move and sleep. On Monday morning your master clock, your liver and your work calendar were each running on slightly different schedules. In effect, you flew one time zone west without leaving home.

This is the gentler direction of travel. The average human body clock runs a little longer than 24 hours, so it drifts later more easily than it moves earlier. Gaining an hour means your rhythm only has to stretch, and most people settle within a few days to a week. The spring change, which takes an hour away, is the harder of the two.

## You are waking early and fading by 9pm

The clock on the wall now reads an hour earlier than the clock in your head. When your alarm says 7am, your body is running at 8am. When the evening news starts at 10pm, your brain is already at 11pm, and melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy, has been rising for longer than the clock suggests.

The result this week is drowsiness in the early evening followed by waking before the alarm. Early risers feel it most. If you naturally wake at 6am, you will now wake at 5am, and if you keep going to bed at your usual clock time, you lose sleep every night until your rhythm catches up. Parents of toddlers and anyone with a dog will recognise the pattern, since neither children nor animals read clocks.

## Darker afternoons weigh on your mood

The clock change moves an hour of daylight from the end of the working day to the start of it, when most people are indoors getting ready for work. In London the sun now sets around 4.45pm, and by 13th December it will be down before 4pm.

Hospital records covering nearly two decades in Denmark show that depression diagnoses rose by around 8 per cent in the month after the clocks went back, and the rise tracked the clock change itself rather than shorter days or bad weather. The likeliest explanation is the loss of daylight in the hours when you are free to be outside. Light is the strongest signal your brain uses to regulate both melatonin and serotonin, the chemical messenger most closely tied to mood. The effect fades over roughly ten weeks, but if you have struggled with low mood in previous winters, this is the week to plan ahead.

Your heart may fare better. In one large hospital dataset, heart attack admissions fell by around a fifth on the Tuesday after the clocks went back, the mirror image of the spike seen after the spring change, when everyone loses an hour of sleep.

## Your hunger now arrives an hour early

Appetite runs on a timetable too. Ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger, climbs in anticipation of your usual meal times, and leptin, the hormone that signals fullness, follows its own daily curve. If you normally eat lunch at 1pm, your hunger will now arrive at noon by the new clock, and the same shift applies to dinner.

Appetite also peaks naturally in your body's evening, and any sleep you lose this week tilts the balance further. Short nights push ghrelin up and leptin down, which explains why tired people reach for sugar, bread and anything else that delivers fast energy. Add an afternoon that looks like night by 5pm, and the biscuit tin becomes very persuasive.

## Eight ways to help your body adjust this week

**1. Seek light in the afternoon for the first few days.** Your clock needs to move an hour later, and light in the late afternoon and early evening pushes it in that direction. Take a walk at lunchtime or in the last hour of daylight, and keep your rooms bright until about two hours before bed.

**2. Keep the dawn out of your bedroom.** The sun now rises before 7am in London, and early light through thin curtains will wake you an hour ahead of your alarm. Blackout blinds or an eye mask protect the last hour of your sleep.

**3. Hold your wake time steady.** Get up at the same clock time every day this week, including next weekend. A fixed wake time anchors every other rhythm in your body, and a long lie-in on Saturday sends you back to the start.

**4. Move your bedtime later in 15-minute steps.** If you are falling asleep at 9pm, stay up 15 minutes later each night until you reach your usual time. Small steps let your master clock keep pace without leaving you exhausted.

**5. Eat by the new clock.** The clocks in your liver and gut reset with food, so meal times are one of the fastest ways to bring them into line. Eat breakfast at your usual clock time and include protein, plan a proper snack for the noon dip rather than grazing, and finish dinner at least three hours before bed.

**6. Keep naps to 20 minutes and finish them before 3pm.** A long nap on a dark afternoon feels restorative, but it drains the sleep pressure you need to fall asleep at night and keeps you in the early-evening slump for longer.

**7. Put caffeine and alcohol on a tight leash.** Your body clock is at its most sensitive in the first three to five days after the change. Caffeine stays active in your system for many hours, so keep coffee to the morning. Alcohol may help you fall asleep, but it breaks up the second half of the night, which is the sleep you most need this week.

**8. Make morning light a habit for the winter.** Once you are sleeping through to your alarm again, switch your outdoor time to the first hour after waking. Twenty to 30 minutes outside, even on an overcast day, gives your master clock a far stronger signal than any indoor lighting, and it makes the lamps you switch on in the evening matter much less. That daily dose steadies your rhythm and your mood through to the shortest day on 21st December. If low mood lingers for weeks, speak to your GP: light therapy with a bright light box is a recognised treatment for seasonal depression.

## You may not have to do this for many more years

Spain asked the European Union last autumn to end seasonal clock changes from 2026, with backing from Finland and Poland, and the European Commission put the issue back on its work programme for this year. Member states have still not agreed a common position, and the Commission has already published summer time dates up to 2031. The UK has no plans to stop changing its clocks. Most sleep scientists favour permanent standard time, the winter time you woke up to on Sunday, since it keeps the clock closest to the sun. Until the law changes, your next shift comes on Sunday 28th March 2027, when you hand the hour back.