The Circadian Reset Protocol: How to Actually Fix What Daylight Saving Time Broke

If you're reading this, you survived Monday. Which is apparently one of the least healthy and most dangerous days on the calendar, so good job.

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, go back and do that first. The short version is: this isn't just one bad Monday. It's a population-wide circadian disruption with measurable consequences, and it takes four to five weeks to fully recover from. If you're lucky, you'll start feeling normal again by this weekend. But don't count on it.

And I'm sorry, I still don't care if you like the extra hour of light in the evening. By July it won't be dark until 9pm down here in Texas, and none of you are going to be thanking the government for that.

This post is the protocol. What to actually do over the next few weeks to get your biology back in sync. The full science behind why it all works is coming in Part 3. For now, here's what to do.

First, Understand What You're Actually Fixing

Your circadian system is not a sleep schedule. It's a 24-hour hormonal coordination system that runs every function in your body on a timed sequence: when cortisol peaks, when melatonin rises, when your digestive enzymes are active, when your immune system does its maintenance, when your liver cleans up the blood and does cellular repair. All of it is anchored to the light and dark cycle. Specifically, to the light hitting your retinas at specific times of day.

When the clocks spring forward, the sun doesn't move. Your alarm does. For the next four to five weeks, your biology is running an hour behind the clock on your wall.

You're not tired because you're lazy or out of shape or getting older. You're tired because your cortisol hasn't peaked when the alarm goes off, your melatonin hasn't fully cleared in the morning and isn't rising early enough in the evening, and your core body temperature is still descending when your body expects it to be at its lowest point. Everything is running one hour behind the sun and there's no shortcut around that.

The steps below give your brain's clock the inputs it needs to start recalibrating: light in the morning, darkness in the evening, consistent timing, and less chemical interference. That's the whole framework.

The Morning Protocol

Get outside within 30 minutes of waking. No exceptions this week.

You need sun on your face. If it's raining, open a window and get fresh air on your skin. Here's something most people don't know: photoreceptors aren't only in your eyes. They're in your skin, and on your face specifically. Your retinas are the high-density receptors that do the heavy lifting for circadian signaling, but getting light on your face matters too. Every bit of input helps your brain's clock start to reset.

The morning light signal sets the timing for everything that follows over the next 24 hours: your cortisol arc, melatonin decrease during the day and increase at night, digestion, immune function. All of it. And that signal has to come from actual sunlight. Not indoor lighting. Not light through a window. Glass filters the wavelengths your retinas need. You have to be outside, sky visible, full spectrum.

Five minutes moves the needle. Thirty minutes is significantly better. If you can walk while you're doing it, great. If you can't, stand on your porch and look at the sky while you drink your coffee. The earlier you do it, the stronger the anchoring signal. Don't skip it because it's cold or cloudy. Overcast skylight is still exponentially brighter than anything inside your house, and it's full spectrum in a way that LED and fluorescent lighting never will be.

Don't wear sunglasses in the morning.

Your retinas need the full spectrum to reset your circadian clock. Save the sunglasses for midday.

Drink water before coffee.

I keep a 32-ounce glass of water on my nightstand. Feet hit the floor, I start drinking. I try to finish it before I get to the coffee pot. Dehydration is a chemical stressor, and your adrenal glands respond to chemical stress the same way they respond to every other kind of stress: by producing cortisol. Your cortisol rhythm is already disrupted this week. Don't add a dehydration stress response on top of it before you've made it to the kitchen.

Lock in your wake time and hold it.

I screwed this up myself this morning. Alarm went off at 5:40, I turned it off and slept until 8. Not my finest hour.

Your brain's clock is far more sensitive to wake time than bedtime. The research is consistent on this: not sleeping in more than one hour past your normal wake time is one of the most effective things you can do for your circadian rhythm. Not sleeping in at all is better.

This was one of the biggest shifts in my own functioning. I used to work nights early in practice, parking cars at restaurants on weekends, then sleep until 10 or 11 on Sunday when my normal wake time was 7 or 8. Mondays and Tuesdays were miserable. I'd start feeling human again by Wednesday. Once I locked in a consistent wake time regardless of the day, that pattern disappeared. It's that impactful.

The Evening Protocol

Dim your lights after sunset.

Not at bedtime. After sunset. Overhead lighting in most American homes is far brighter than your biology expects after dark, and your pineal gland is monitoring light intensity in the evening to decide when to start releasing melatonin. Bright overhead lights read as "still daytime" and push melatonin onset back.

After sunset, shift to lamps, salt lamps, candlelight, warm-spectrum bulbs. Your evening light environment should not look like your midday light environment.

Get the TrueDark glasses. Seriously.

I have tried a lot of blue light blocking glasses. A lot. Most of them are partial solutions at best. The first night I put on the TrueDark Twilights I honestly thought they were going to be BS. I was trying to prove Dave Asprey wrong. I could not. I was asleep at my desk within thirty minutes. I couldn't hold my eyes open.

Here's the clinical reason they work better than standard blue blockers: most cheap blue light glasses only block blue light wavelengths. Research has confirmed that green and violet light suppress melatonin and disrupt the circadian clock just as effectively as blue does. Clear or yellow-tinted lenses filter 40 to 75% of blue light and essentially nothing else. The TrueDark Twilights block 99% of blue, green, and violet combined. There's EEG data showing they shift brainwaves from alert beta to calm alpha within minutes of putting them on.

They make three lenses: yellow Daylights for daytime screen use, gradient Sunsets for the early evening transition, and deep red Twilights for the hour before bed. The affiliate link is coming once I'm approved. Search TrueDark in the meantime. Worth every penny.

Screens off an hour before bed.

Your pineal gland cannot tell the difference between blue light from a screen and blue light from the sky. It reads both as "sun is up, hold the melatonin." This matters every week. This week it's non-negotiable.

Stop eating two to three hours before bed.

Your digestive system has its own circadian rhythm. Digestive enzyme production, gastric acid secretion, intestinal motility: all of it follows a timed sequence driven through the vagus nerve, and all of it winds down in the evening. Eating late forces your gut to work during a window where it should be biologically winding down. This elevates your core body temperature at exactly the time it needs to be falling, suppresses melatonin onset, and fragments your sleep in the second half of the night. Your digestive clock is already running an hour off solar time this week. Don't make it work harder.

Cool your bedroom down.

I am a strong proponent of this. My wife is not on the same page. The electric bill is also not on the same page. But the physiology is clear: core body temperature needs to drop one to two degrees to trigger sleep onset and maintain deep sleep. Most American bedrooms are too warm.

Target 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. If your partner runs warm, a cooling mattress pad is worth looking into. I have dogs, so I'm limited in what I can actually use, but the principle stands regardless of your domestic situation.

The Chemical Protocol

Cut alcohol this week. Or at least cut it back significantly.

I know. But hear the mechanism out.

Alcohol makes you drowsy. It does not produce restorative sleep. What it actually does is suppress REM sleep in the second half of the night, increase sleep fragmentation as it metabolizes, and leave you more depleted in the morning than if you'd skipped it entirely. If you have a WHOOP, you can see this directly in your recovery scores.

REM sleep is where memory consolidation happens, where emotional regulation resets, and where your microglial cells clean out the metabolic waste from your brain. The kind of cleanup that, when it doesn't happen consistently over years, contributes to neurodegeneration. One drink is probably not going to derail you. A bottle of wine because the clocks changed is going to make your Tuesday genuinely awful.

Cut caffeine off by 1pm.

Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors. Adenosine is the compound that builds up in your brain throughout the day and creates sleep pressure, the biological drive to sleep. Caffeine doesn't reduce adenosine. It just blocks the signal. When it clears, all that accumulated adenosine hits at once. That's the crash.

If you've been using caffeine to mask DST fatigue, you've been building adenosine debt that is making your evenings harder and your sleep less restorative. Cut the last coffee off at 1pm this week. Noon if you're sensitive. It takes six to eight hours to fully clear, and you need your adenosine signaling intact by the time you want to be asleep.

Magnesium before bed.

Magnesium glycinate or magnesium threonate, 200 to 400mg about an hour before sleep. Magnesium threonate is more specific to the brain and supports the GABAergic pathways, the brake system of your nervous system, that allow your brain to transition from wakefulness into sleep. It's involved in over 300 enzymatic processes, most people are running deficient, and the deficit shows up most obviously as difficulty falling asleep, muscle tension, and waking in the early morning hours. Low-risk, inexpensive, and it moves the needle for most people. Check with your practitioner if you're on medications.

If You're Already Running Depleted

This section is for the people who recognize themselves in this description: afternoon energy crashes, difficulty waking up regardless of how much sleep you got, poor stress tolerance, frequent illness, running on empty in a way that sleep doesn't fix.

If that's your baseline, your adrenal system was already under strain before the clock changed. Chronic circadian disruption and adrenal exhaustion feed each other directly: disrupted sleep elevates cortisol, elevated cortisol degrades sleep quality, degraded sleep further disrupts the rhythm. The spiral goes one direction and it goes fast.

For you, this is not a week to push harder. It's a week to be more conservative across every variable.

More sleep, not less. If you need to be in bed at 9pm, do it. Less intense exercise: high-intensity training is a cortisol spike your adrenals don't have the reserve to manage right now. There's one exception: a short Tabata, twenty seconds on, ten seconds off, four minutes total, first thing in the morning. That brief cortisol spike can actually help anchor your morning cortisol peak if your timing is off. But outside of that: walk, stretch, save the intensity for when you've recalibrated. Better blood sugar management: eat protein at every meal, aim for roughly one gram per fifty pounds of body weight as a starting point, eliminate sugar this week. Every blood sugar crash is an adrenal stress event, and you cannot afford extra ones right now.

One tool I've been recommending for patients in this state is the Apollo Neuro wearable. The mechanism is worth understanding before you write it off as a gadget.

Your sense of touch is a direct input to your autonomic nervous system. Apollo delivers specific low-frequency vibration patterns through your wrist or ankle that your nervous system interprets as a safety signal, actively shifting autonomic state from sympathetic dominance toward parasympathetic. Rest and digest. The mode your adrenals actually recover in.

For patients whose nervous system is stuck in low-grade activation, which is exactly what depleted adrenal function looks like clinically, the problem isn't just fatigue. It's that the system never fully downshifts into the recovery state. Sleep is lighter. HRV stays suppressed. The repair cycles don't run properly. Apollo works directly on that problem. Over seven completed clinical studies showing measurable improvements in deep sleep, REM sleep architecture, heart rate variability, and recovery time. It's HSA and FSA eligible. Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The risk is low and the mechanism is real.

I don't recommend a lot of wearables. Most of them measure things without changing anything. This one actually changes something.

If the depleted-baseline description fits you not just this week but as your everyday reality, that's worth looking at more systematically. DST week just made it visible.

What to Expect Week by Week

Week one: The hardest. Monday and Tuesday especially. Morning fatigue is real, afternoon crashes may be worse than usual. Stay the course.

Week two: Mornings start to feel marginally less brutal. Energy is still inconsistent. The morning light habit is starting to anchor your cortisol peak. Keep going.

Weeks three and four: You start to feel closer to normal. Mornings are more manageable. Evening sleepiness arrives at a more appropriate time. The recalibration is working.

Week five: Most people are back to their pre-DST baseline. People with adrenal dysfunction often take longer. That's useful clinical information, not a failure.

Do not evaluate the protocol on Wednesday of this week and decide it isn't working. You are recalibrating a biological system against an artificial one-hour offset. It takes time. Trust the process and stay consistent.

The Short Version

Morning sunlight within 30 minutes of waking, outside, no sunglasses, every day. Consistent wake time, no sleeping in. Dim lights and TrueDark glasses after sunset. Screens off an hour before bed. Water before coffee. Stop eating two to three hours before bed. Cool bedroom. Cut alcohol this week. Caffeine off by 1pm. Magnesium before bed. If you're depleted: sleep more, train less, eat protein, cut sugar, consider Apollo Neuro.

Do that for five weeks. Your biology will catch up.

Part 3 covers the full science underneath all of this: the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the cortisol and melatonin arc across the full 24 hours, and the extraordinary overlap between what Traditional Chinese Medicine mapped out thousands of years ago and what modern neuroscience has confirmed with imaging and hormone assays. If you want to understand why this protocol works at a mechanistic level, that one's worth your time.

Part 2 of a 3-part series on circadian rhythms, the biology of seasonal health, and why fighting darkness is fighting your own physiology. Read Part 1 here.

If DST week is hitting you harder than it should, or if the depleted-baseline description sounds like your everyday reality, come in. Dr. JJ Gregor uses Applied Kinesiology and functional health approaches to identify what's driving chronic fatigue and dysfunction at his Frisco, Texas practice. Schedule a consultation.