The clocks go back on 25 October. Keep fifteen minutes of that hour for yourself

The clocks are going back soon. Sunday 25 October, to be precise. And I looooove that extra hour. It feels like I’ve won the lottery.

But the change really does throw me out. I don’t feel like myself for a few days, if not a week.

So here’s what I’ve learned. The clocks go back one hour at 2am on Sunday 25 October 2026, when British Summer Time ends. To protect your sleep you only need two things: get into daylight as soon as you wake up, and get up at your usual time. Then do one thing nobody tells you to do. Take fifteen minutes of that extra hour and give it to your head before you go to sleep. Here’s why.

Why one hour makes you wobbly

Your phone changes the time on its own. Your body doesn’t. If you normally wake at 6am, your body will still wake you at the same moment on Sunday, and the clock will say 5am. In the evening you’ll feel ready for bed an hour before the clock agrees.

For most people it passes quickly. Australia’s Sleep Health Foundation says the autumn change “usually only takes one night” to get over, against up to a week in spring. I’m clearly not most people. If you aren’t either, read on.

You don’t need a four-day plan

Most advice about the clocks is a list of things to start on Thursday. That’s one more thing to get wrong. These two do most of the work:

• Daylight, as soon as you’re up. Open the curtains straight away. An NHS sleep therapist points out that even a cloudy morning helps set your body clock. The mornings are lighter for a few weeks now, so have your tea by the window.
• Get up at your usual time. The NHS says going to bed and getting up at similar times each day helps your body know when it’s time to sleep. Have the lie-in on Sunday if you want it. Then go back to normal on Monday.

If you like a plan, the same NHS therapist suggests going to bed fifteen minutes later each night from the Thursday. It’s optional. It’s less optional with small children, who will be up at 5am whatever the clock says: moving their bedtime fifteen minutes later each night is what that advice was written for.

The hour is yours. Spend fifteen minutes of it thinking

When we wrote The 3am Report, the thing I kept coming back to was this: I don’t think most women have a sleep problem. I think they have a no-time-to-think problem. The day never gives you a gap, so it all arrives when your head hits the pillow.

In one lab study, people who wrote a to-do list at bedtime fell asleep faster than people who didn’t.

This is the one weekend of the year that hands you a gap. So on Sunday night, before you turn the light out:

1. Take a pen and a notebook to bed. Fifteen minutes. Paper, not your phone.
2. Write tomorrow’s list. The NHS suggests writing down what you need to do tomorrow before you go to sleep.
3. Write what’s still going round from today. Sleep clinics use a version of this: about fifteen minutes to go through what’s on your mind. They suggest doing it earlier in the evening. I do it in bed, because that’s when it all turns up.
4. Close the notebook and put it on the floor. It’s on paper now. You don’t have to hold it in your head all night.

It probably isn’t the clock

Here’s what our own numbers say. For the report we looked at six years of listening in the Clementine app: 541,097 plays from 25,950 people, nine in ten of them women. We counted which nights women pressed play on something to help them sleep.

I checked the things people swear keep them awake. The full moon, storms, payday, heatwaves, Blue Monday: none of them showed up. What did show up was the night before something. And Monday. For women in the UK, Monday night was 57% busier than Saturday night, the quietest of the week.

That shows when women went looking for help, not how everyone sleeps. And I haven’t looked at the clock-change night itself in our numbers, so I won’t pretend to know. But the first working day on the new time is a Monday. If you’re awake that night, I’d bet on the week ahead before I’d blame the clock. So keep Monday evening clear.

A wobbly week is a patch, not a problem

Of the 26,000 people who used our app, 64 used it most nights. Almost nobody sleeps badly every night. We sleep badly in patches, when there’s more to process than usual.

So if you’re awake at 5am on Sunday, nothing is wrong with you. The NHS advice is that if you’re still awake after around 20 minutes, get up, sit somewhere comfortable and do something quiet until you feel sleepy. If the early waking was there before the clocks changed, read why you’re waking at 3am.