“You have to have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar”. It is advice from the well-known Galician psychiatrist Jesús Fraiz, who explains to EFE that having a late and abundant dinner affects more night rest than a time change like the one that will materialize the next morning.
The winter schedule that began last October ends tonight, so that at 2:00 a.m. the clocks will have to be advanced one hour, until 3:00 a.m., as established by a controversial European directive that all member states.
Fraiz downplays the problem that this clockwise movement can cause because he understands that it will only have a real effect for a couple of weeks: “Many patients are affected by the change because they sleep poorly and feel worse, but it is a matter of time adjust to the new schedule. And before long, he deepens.
Thus, for this specialist there is another factor that influences much more in the lack of sleep: food. In his opinion, more important than the time change would be to bring forward the dinner time in Spain: “It is essential to have a good sleep, people would have fewer nightmares and digestion would be much better,” he points out.
Many citizens with problems of this style have passed through his clinic. It reminds everyone of an old saying, the one that begins this chronicle and that he never tires of repeating. Paying attention to it will help, this doctor believes, to reduce the probability of mood deficits, which are more “important” than the temporary harmful effects that the time change can cause.
Although the European Union recommended that member states end these time changes, it did so before the pandemic and the arrival of the coronavirus prevented that decision from being taken.
“The pandemic has triggered coronaphobia, the fear of contagion, and people have become less sociable,” says Fraiz, who emphasizes the importance of recovering habits that were good and modifying others that are not so good.
“Advance dinner or television viewing hours” is key, he repeats over and over again.
In this he agrees with Gonzalo Pin Arboledas, head of the sleep unit at Hospital Quirónsalud Valencia, who has told EFE that “we sleep about 40 minutes less than in other European countries due to our schedules, and this time change favors that Loss of sleep”.
There are studies that affirm that maintaining a permanent schedule helps regulate the body’s circadian rhythms, which are altered during the time change.
“But not all people are the same”, says Fraiz, who goes further: “When there is only one hour of change, the differences are not very big either”.
In this sense, Pin Arboledas considers that the time change that comes into force already “gives us more light at night and delays the time to sleep, but the time to wake up remains the same, which is associated with the increase in the deficit chronic sleep in general in the population”.
Another point of view, a third and last one, is that of the scientist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) Jorge Mira, who is one of those who conscientiously defends the time change, since, according to his research, it allows optimizing the use of sunlight and, in this way, make the most of the morning and get more hours of daytime leisure.
As always, in this old debate there are supporters and detractors.
