Surviving the time changes from Standard to Daylight Savings and back again, can be a challenge, and in our practice at Gateway Psychiatric, we always see an uptick in the numbers of people reporting sleep disruption and/or hypomania during the Northern Hemisphere spring.
At the beginning of Spring and Fall, in higher latitudes both North and South, the length of daylight changes rapidly. Some days, it’s a perceptible difference from one day to the next, which poses challenges, especially for people who need to work to keep daily routines and circadian rhythm cycles to maintain mood stability.
Now is a time to do a quick inventory of your daily routines to keep them in good shape and stave off the threat of disruption from lengthening daylight times. Maintain a steady sleep schedule through the time change. Go to bed earlier so you can get up earlier, which means essentially keeping your sleep times the same. The “spring forward” time change encourages us to wake up earlier, and feel energized, even without the usual amount of sleep, which puts us at risk for hypomania or mania, so watch out for a reduction in sleep time without a corresponding increase in tiredness.
If sleep times are difficult to maintain as daylight times lengthen, you might want to explore the use of blue light blocking in the evening before bedtime. Blue light is a part of the spectrum that our brains associate with daytime and wakefulness, so in the modern world where indoor lighting, screens and TV bombard us with blue light, blocking it can be shown to have a beneficial effect.
Check in with a close friend or family member; someone you live with is best. Ask them to note carefully any behavioral changes they may see in you. Hypomania can be tricky, and often someone close to you will be aware of it before you are. Ask them to watch for signs like increased irritability, spending more, drinking more or keeping busier than usual. Catching it early means you can add more “down time” into your schedule and remind yourself to just enjoy the warmer weather, not use it for permission to go “all out”.
Our modern world doesn’t make it easy for us to maintain stability, and with a chronic illness, you have to put more energy into maintenance. Seasonal change can be challenging, but it’s a part of life. We can work the expectation of change and flux throughout the year into our daily routines, and then each change is not a new stumbling block, but an old friend coming back around. You have it in you to handle this!