Dr. Aarti Jagannath

Personally, I love long evenings.

I love the alfresco meals.

But there is a biological cost.

Our bodies have an internal clock and this internal clock has evolved to precisely calculate when sunrise should happen and therefore when we should wake up and be alert and get into our jobs.

Now, if we shift that artificially, we haven't actually shifted either our cycle or the light-dark cycle, just our relationship with it.

Everything in your body is exquisitely timed to the light-dark cycle, not to our clocks.

Biologically, an hour out of 24 is not trivial because your body has not yet trained itself to understand that it's time for the sleep hormones to switch off.

So your body is not quite there when we're asked to do these complicated tasks.

So when the clocks shift, we know there are more heart attacks, more workplace accidents, traffic accidents.

People who are hit the hardest by this are night owls or people who struggle to get up in the morning.

So teenagers, shift workers...

Teenagers have a surge of hormones that have a very real effect on the clocks.

As we grow older, the way our hormones interact with the clock changes drastically.

A teenager is naturally delayed by a couple of hours.

So your son wants to sleep late in the evenings and wants to wake up late.

We can help by limiting the amount of light exposure in the evening and giving them as much bright sunshine light exposure as possible in the morning because that naturally aligns your clock to be moving earlier in time.

In the mornings, yes, and then take away the device in the evening.

Dormouse.

It'd be lovely, wouldn't it?

It would.