‘Paleo lighting’ can fix your brain’s clock after daylight savings

Scientific American · Randy J. Nelson · 2026-10-30 17:00 UTC

The clocks falling back this weekend will give you the opportunity to sleep like a caveman

At 2 A.M. on November 1, the clocks will fall back, and for one weekend out of the year, the whole country will think about light and time. Most people will spend the extra hour asleep and the following week complaining that it’s nearly dark at 5 P.M. Regardless of how you feel about the time change, for the next four months the sun will rise in the sky closer to the time you do. That alignment is the best thing that could happen to your body clock—and your sleep—all year.

Of course, you can try to buy your way into a better night’s sleep right now: mouth tape, tablets of magnesium glycinate, blackout curtains, a wearable sensor that grades your sleep, a mattress that maintains a chill 62-degree-Fahrenheit temperature. The stack of such approaches can run into the thousands of dollars and has a name on social media—“sleep maxxing.” It’s the wellness market’s latest way of turning a basic human function into a product line.

But the two things that will do the most for your sleep cost nothing. That is because nobody has figured out how to package them.

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