Daylight Saving Time, Acute Sleep Disruption, and Return-to-Baseline Patterns in All of Us Fitbit Data

Seasonal daylight saving time (DST) transitions abruptly alter the alignment between clock time, environmental light, and sleep. In preregistered analyses, we used longitudinal Fitbit data from the All of Us Research Program to compare sleep around 13 seasonal transitions in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah with sleep on the same dates in Arizona, where clocks do not change. The sample included 1,522 participants and 6,658 participant-transition windows. Following the spring transition, sleep duration changed more from one night to the next in Mountain states than in Arizona (14.6 minutes, 95% CI [7.2, 22.0]), even though sleep duration itself on day +1 showed little evidence of a DST-related reduction (-8.4 minutes, 95% CI [-17.3, 0.6]). Sleep timing shifted later after the spring transition and about 28 minutes earlier after the fall transition. Among Mountain-state observations with a large post-transition departure from usual sleep duration, the median return to the usual range was two nights. Nearly the same two-night pattern appeared in Arizona after similarly large sleep departures, indicating that this return pattern was not specific to DST. Greater baseline sleep-duration variability predicted a greater likelihood of remaining outside the usual range at days +7 and +14. Seasonal clock changes produced acute sleep disruption, while the Arizona comparison shows that a rapid return to baseline should not be interpreted as the duration of recovery from DST itself.