Daylight Saving Time Is Exhausting — How to Care for Yourself This Week - Podcast Transcript

You can listen to this full episode here: Ep 19: Daylight Saving Time Is Exhausting

If you’re feeling exhausted, irritable, foggy, or emotionally off after Daylight Saving Time, you’re not imagining it... and you’re not alone.

The sudden time change disrupts sleep, rhythm, and nervous system regulation, especially during an already demanding season. In this episode of Anchored & Alive, Blaze offers grounding reassurance and body-first support for navigating the days after the clock change without forcing productivity or questioning your motivation.

This conversation is about orientation, not optimization, and about letting your system catch up with the clock at its own pace.

Hello, my dears. It is Monday morning if you're listening right when this is released, and it is the first hours after daylight savings in the United States, and I just want to give you all a big hug and say it's going to be okay.

I think the daylight savings hangover is real, and it feels awful.

And we're all told to just kind of power through and that's not the way to handle it. It's just, it's awful and nobody wants to deal with it.

So we're now asked in the middle of this really demanding, exhausting, cold season to suddenly gear up and get up essentially an hour earlier. So you lose an hour of sleep on top of already probably not getting enough.

You're going to go out and it's darker than it's been all winter because we've just reset back to where it was a few months ago with the daylight.

Because it's like we're so impatient, like the sun isn't gonna rise earlier anyway, because it is, and it's, you know, setting later too, but...

The world has decided that's not good enough, so we're all a little grumpy about it. We get out there on the road and everybody's crazy and tired, and it's like everybody's hung over.

And we are because we're all sleep deprived and we're just trying to get through with our coffee.

And there's real rage there because we didn't get a choice. This isn't what we chose. And for the few people in the US that have opted out, I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous Arizona, but.

Yeah, a lot of us are feeling the rage today. And I think there's ways that we can cope here that will make us feel better, and that acknowledge that we have lost something this week and now is not the week to try to optimize anything or capitalize on this extra hour or any of that crap because most of us are going to be off for at least this week if not more.

Because it's worse than traveling. I feel like when you travel and switch time zones, like you're prepared for that and you know it's gonna happen and generally you chose to do it or it's very temporary and then you return to your normal time.

But this is just a arbitrary like, hey, guess what? We're changing everything on you. And guess what? In a few more months, we're going to do it again. But in the opposite direction, so whatever.

So many of us are over it. This isn't about how we can petition the system to change and get better.

This is about coping with what we're all dealing with. So here's how we can get through this week without completely overwhelming ourselves.

What we can do is decide today we're just going to pick the one essential task that needs to get done today and be completely okay with that.

So you're going to treat the day as though this was an anomalous weather event or you're recovering from an illness.

It isn't a productivity test or anything like that. It's not the day to assess your motivation or your future.

And it's also not the day to make any big decisions because our bodies react physically to this stuff whether we're aware of it or not. So our emotions are going to be running higher than usual.

We react rougher to everything when something like this happens.

So it's the time to recognize that we're not at our best. No one else is either. So that's like really important is to realize like this is the day where everyone you encounter is a little bit off.

And everyone's not okay. And we've all been feeling that in general anyway for months. So now it's just on top of that. Let's have another difficult stressful thing. So here's what else we can do to make things better.

You want to anchor your body before you worry about your mind and what you're thinking.

So your brain is going to be grumpy when your body is disoriented and just recognize that daylight savings makes us disoriented. So the simple body-first thing that you can do is try to drink some water before you do caffeine.

Try to eat something warm, even like toast will count.

Step outside briefly into the daylight. You probably have already if you're listening to this, but if not, at some point in this day, just get out there and take in some fresh air, even if it's not sunny, you are getting more daylight on your skin than you think you are. And it doesn't need to be more than a few minutes.

And you can try and regulate by having a stretch or a sway rather than engaging in full exercise so that you're giving your body signals of safety and rhythm and that you're cool. You want to be able to do this because your body can understand that language.

Without you explaining it mentally, you're not gonna be able to convince yourself of anything.

Your body is looking for felt comfort and a signal that it's okay, because to your body your body is like, "Whoa, why did we have to get up an hour earlier than normal? That seems like I should be on alert and on alarm."

So if you know that, it also helps take it down a little bit to be like, oh, that's why everyone feels this way is... Legit. Our bodies are confused and we don't know what's going on.

So you can also use light strategically. It's kind of, I think, the point of daylight savings time this time of year is giving us more light later in the day, but more light earlier in the day is generally what helps us out the most.

So if you're able to try to get some light this morning. In the afternoon, it'll kind of help perk you back up if you're on your break and you just need to get back in your body.

In the evening, that extra light is going to be confusing. That's just what I want to say. Like your body will see it and go, "Right, it's 4 o'clock. Nope, it's 5 o'clock. Nope, it's 6 o'clock. Like we're just confused."

So know that that's what's happening and choose that it's okay to decide to dim your lights earlier tonight, to decide that you're still on the old schedule and you're going to let your body take a few days to kind of adjust to this new arc.

You want to give your system a chance to catch up without forcing it because that's the kindest thing to do.

And here's what else I want to say is don't interpret your mood today.

Don't feel like being irritable is the truth of who you are today.

Don't confuse being sluggish with not desiring things. Don't just confuse being a little bit off with feeling like somehow you're not determined or you don't have goals or you're not engaged. Low motivation is not the same as failing here.

So today is not a reliable narrator of your life and what's going on.

And giving yourself that permission is powerful to your body and powerful to your emotions in your mind. So you can repeat after me.

Today isn't about me. Today is not something that I chose and how I feel today is not the story of me or my life or my purpose or any kind of meaning. Whew, that's nice.

And then I'd say you want to choose movements today in this week that are restorative, not mobilizing.

So while I think that when we hit milestones like daylight savings time,

We associate that with getting ready to do more stuff. Like, woohoo, game on. We have more light in the evening, so go, go, go. We have more time for that now.

But March is about starting things. It's not about sprinting. It's not about getting everything done, it's about starting to pave the way for that.

So think about walking as being more powerful for you this week than doing a full workout. And that stretching is probably more powerful than pushing yourself really hard.

And also giving yourself some warmth, so like think warm soups, warm teas, is going to give you greater benefit this week than burning a lot of energy. So you're still trying to build your energy right now, not to deplete it all.

So just having a few minutes of just soft, easy movement helps you kind of retrain your rhythm without draining all of the reserves that you've hopefully been building up over this winter and this fall.

So something that I'm planning on doing today and over the week to help me transition is to treat myself and feed myself like I'm recovering from something because I am recovering from the shock of the whole world suddenly not being at the right time.

So what I'm doing is thinking about prioritizing protein and carbs and warm meals.

Not too much of it, just warm and soothing comfort foods, familiar foods, and prioritizing fewer decisions, having things kind of pre-prepped or just going out to eat because it's convenient is okay for me this week because it's reducing all of the swings that happen from not having high enough blood sugar. So I'm just like, "Okay, I'm keeping the protein going so that I can digest stuff and keep my energy going through the mornings when it's really hard."

And I also want to reduce decision fatigue because remember, we're all operating at less capacity, we just don't have as much energy because we lost sleep.

And that's harmful. It's not great. So we also are going to start softening our expectations around being consistent.

So you might be tempted to get back on track and figure out what's going on and come up with your whole plan.

or you might be punishing yourself for not being able to keep up with plans that you already had or routines that were already there.

It's okay. Your body is going to be adjusting and consistency is going to come back, but it might not surface today and it might not surface this week.

And you might be irritable and everyone around you might be irritable this week. Today and this week is about orientation.

It's not about a perfectly executed life. So.

What we can do instead of raging at the world, which I want to do, but it's okay, is to say, I can't control the clock, but I can choose to move slower today.

And that's giving me my choice back without denying that I'm dealing with something annoying because I am annoyed.

So tonight my friends, let's go to bed a little bit earlier than we think is necessary.

Let's let today be incomplete and allow our systems to recalibrate because that really does count as progress.

I'm sending you all so much love. Happy daylight savings time. And if you have feelings about it, please reach out. I want to hear from you. I love

everybody feeling the permission to just say exactly how they feel about everything because it makes us less alone.

And sometimes it's just hearing someone else say what we're thinking makes me laugh or makes me go, "Oh thank goodness I'm not the only one feeling this way."

And just knowing that helps everything feel better. So I hope that you are doing great. If you're tired, I am too.

I'm sending you so much love and I will see you next week on our regular and yet somehow altered schedule. I'll see you then.

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