You got an hour back at 2 a.m. this morning. Here is the only sleep product that has ever worked.

Clocks fell back an hour at 2 a.m. this morning, and most of the country got the one sleep intervention with no subscription, no sensor and no side effects: more time in bed. Since we last marked this day, the sleep-tech market has delivered another year of mattresses that heat and cool, rings that grade you, mouth tape, melatonin gummies and bedside devices that promise to engineer your night. Today is a good day to notice that the single largest sleep gain most people will get this year arrived free, by act of Congress, while they slept.

What the clock change teaches. The spring shift, when an hour is taken away, is the one associated in observational studies with more heart attacks, more road accidents and worse mood in the days that follow; the autumn shift is gentler, and some studies find a small benefit. The lesson is not about the clock. It is that an hour of sleep, added or removed from a whole population at once, shows up in hospital records. If an hour matters that much when a government moves it, it matters that much when you do. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's position remains that permanent standard time would be better for health than the twice-yearly shift; a bill to make daylight saving time permanent instead passed the Senate in 2022 and has not become law. Whichever way that argument ends, the arithmetic of your own week does not depend on it.

Loree’s take

Patients bring me sleep data from devices that cost hundreds of dollars and then tell me they go to bed at midnight and wake at six. The gadget is measuring a problem whose solution it cannot sell: an earlier bedtime. Tonight, do not move your bedtime to match the new clock. Keep the old one. You will have given yourself an hour a night, permanently, for nothing.

Ben’s take

Sleep is the fundamental the industry has monetized most aggressively, because it is the one you cannot watch yourself do, so you will pay for a report. The report is not the sleep. This morning the whole country got an hour of actual sleep, and no company billed for it. That is the benchmark every sleep product should be measured against, and almost none of them clear it.