Every November and every March, people come in convinced they’ve injured something. They haven’t lifted anything or fallen — the pain just arrived, and they’re looking for the cause.
The Clocks Changed. Your Back Noticed.
UW Medicine’s Right as Rain ran a piece last month on why making daylight saving permanent would be bad for us.
The short version is that your body runs on a clock set by sunlight, and moving the hands around doesn’t move the sun. The sleep doctors they interviewed put real numbers on it — about forty minutes a night lost after the spring change, and that loss can hang on for weeks. The fall change is gentler, but gaining an hour on paper doesn’t mean you actually sleep more.
Here’s the part that shows up in my office.
Every year in the two or three weeks after the clocks change, I see people who are certain they’ve hurt themselves. They didn’t lift anything. They didn’t fall. The back or the neck simply started complaining, and they arrive hunting for the injury that explains it.
Usually there isn’t one. Short sleep lowers your tolerance for pain and raises the resting tension in the muscles that were already working hardest. A joint that has been quietly stiff for months gets loud when you’re running on six hours instead of eight.
If pain arrives without an injury, look at what changed in your sleep before you look for what you did to it.
The patient who wakes with a stiff neck the week the clocks change usually doesn’t have a new neck problem. She has an old one and less tolerance for it.
The advice in the article is sound — hold your normal bedtime rather than chasing the extra hour, and aim for at least seven hours.
If the stiffness is still there in two weeks once your sleep has settled, that isn’t the clocks. Whether it’s showing up as back pain or as neck and shoulder stiffness, a joint that’s stopped moving well doesn’t fix itself with an extra hour in bed. Bring it in — that’s a ten-minute conversation, not a treatment plan.