Every Night Until March
Small Hinges No. 02 · November 2026 · Real change you can feel, one small hinge at a time.
Somewhere in the next two weeks you will walk out to the car and the streetlights will already be on.
Then the odd part. You wake before the alarm. By nine at night you are fading on the couch. By eleven you are wide awake again, staring at the ceiling.
Most people blame the time change. That is the small part of it.
What is really going on
Your body keeps its own time. It sets that time from one thing above all: light.
Morning light pulls your clock earlier. Evening light pushes it later.
November takes the morning light away and fills your evenings with lamps, ceiling lights and screens. So night after night, the clock inside you slides a little later than the one on the wall.
The time change is one hour, once. The drift is every night until March.
That is true wherever you live. In Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Atlantic Canada the clocks go back on 1 November. In British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Yukon they do not move at all. The drift does not care either way. It follows the light, not the clock.
And here is the mistake almost everyone makes. They try to fix it at bedtime. They go to bed earlier, lie there awake, and decide they have a sleep problem.
Bedtime is the wrong end of the day. Three ways to fix it from the right ends.
01 · Hold the morning still
Get up at the same time every day, weekends included. Within half an hour.
Your wake time is the anchor. Every morning it lands in the same place, your body gets a clean signal about when the day starts, and bedtime sorts itself out downstream.
Researchers tracked the sleep of more than 60,000 adults in Britain with wrist monitors and followed them for about six years. People with the most regular sleep timing had a 20 to 48 percent lower risk of dying over that time than people with the least regular. Regularity predicted it better than how long people slept. That shows a link, not a cause, and it is worth saying so.
How: pick the time you need on a Tuesday and keep it on Saturday. If your clocks change on 1 November, get up at your usual time on the new clock and do not spend the extra hour in bed. If your clocks do not change, nothing changes: same alarm. Then get outside, or at least to a window, in the first hour.
02 · Dim the house after nine
For the last two hours before bed, turn the ceiling lights off and use one or two low lamps instead.
Melatonin is the hormone that tells your body it is night. It does not need pitch dark to start, but it does need the lights to come down.
In a controlled study of 116 adults, ordinary room lighting in the hours before bed shortened the time melatonin was switched on by about an hour and a half, compared with dim light. In 103 of 104 people it also pushed the start of melatonin later. Not a phone. Not a screen. Just the normal lights of a normal room.
A bright house at ten at night is telling your body it is still afternoon.
How: from about nine, ceiling lights off. One or two warm lamps, set low, below eye level. The kitchen light is the worst offender. Turn it off once the dishes are done.
03 · The warm shower paradox
Take a warm shower or bath about ninety minutes before bed.
It sounds backwards. To fall asleep your core temperature has to drop, so why add heat?
Because warm water pulls blood out to your hands and feet, and that is where your body dumps heat. You step out and your core cools faster than it would have on its own. That drop is one of the signals your body uses to start sleep.
A review of 17 studies found that water at 40 to 42.5°C, one to two hours before bed, helped people fall asleep faster and rate their sleep better. The researchers put the average gain at about ten minutes, and it worked with as little as ten minutes in the water.
How: warm, not scalding, about ninety minutes before bed. Ten minutes is enough. Then the lamps from number two.
What you get
Hold the morning, dim the evening, and warm up before you cool down. That is the drift handled from both ends, and none of it costs anything.
You will not feel it on Monday. You will feel it in about two weeks, when you notice you have stopped waking up at five.
Four more for November
Book the flu shot before lunch. In a trial of 276 adults over 65, morning shots produced stronger antibody responses than afternoon ones for two of three flu strains. A second trial found the same for adults over 65 and for women. If you are getting one anyway, ask for a morning slot.
Cover your nose, not just your neck. Fifteen minutes in cold air drops the temperature inside your nose by about five degrees. In the lab, that same drop cut the nose's own antiviral defence by nearly half. This is lab evidence for the mechanism, not proof that a scarf prevents colds.
Pick Northern Spy or Red Delicious, and eat the skin. Scientists at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Guelph measured the polyphenols in eight apple varieties. Red Delicious came out highest in the peel, Northern Spy highest in the flesh. Both are late-harvest Ontario apples, so they are at their best right now, and most of the value is in the skin.
Save the jack-o'-lantern seeds. Rinse them, dry them, toss with oil and salt and roast until crisp. One ounce of roasted pumpkin seeds has 156 mg of magnesium, 37 percent of a day's worth and more than almost any other food.
Watch
Light & Your Body Clock, about 2 minutes. Why the darker months throw your sleep out, and the two simple habits that set it right again.
More short videos are on the LeafSource videos page.
The research behind this issue
- Sleep regularity: Windred DP, Burns AC, Lane JM, et al. Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration. Sleep. 2024;47(1):zsad253. 60,977 UK Biobank participants, accelerometer measured, mean follow-up 6.3 years. Observational.
- Evening room light: Gooley JJ, Chamberlain K, Smith KA, et al. Exposure to room light before bedtime suppresses melatonin onset and shortens melatonin duration in humans. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2011;96(3):E463-E472. 116 adults, lab conditions.
- Warm bathing: Haghayegh S, Khoshnevis S, Smolensky MH, Diller KR, Castriotta RJ. Before-bedtime passive body heating by warm shower or bath to improve sleep. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2019;46:124-135. 17 studies reviewed.
- Flu shot timing: Long JE, et al. Morning vaccination enhances antibody response over afternoon vaccination. Vaccine. 2016;34(24):2679-2685. And Liu et al. IMPROVE trial, Immunity & Ageing. 2022;19:46.
- Cold and the nose: Huang D, et al. Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm-mediated nasal antiviral immunity. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2023;151(2):509-525.
- Apple polyphenols: Tsao R, et al. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Guelph. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2003 and 2005.
- Pumpkin seeds: National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements, magnesium fact sheet.
- Clock changes: Province of British Columbia and Government of Alberta, 2026.
This article is for education. It is not medical advice.