By Arca Jalee Wellness 30.09.2025

Sleep Schedule Out of Sync? An Expert Reveals How to Reset It

Whether you're working odd hours or your sleep has drifted into chaos, getting back on track is possible.

Your alarm goes off at 3pm. You've been in bed since 8am. Around you, the world is living a completely different day while you're trying to convince your body it's time to wake up. If you're a shift worker or someone whose sleep schedule has gone rogue, this scenario probably feels familiar: disorienting, exhausting and inexplicably weird.

Dr Charlotte Gupta, who researches shift worker health at the Appleton Institute, spends her professional life watching people attempt to reconcile their work schedules with their circadian rhythms. What she's learned challenges most of the sleep advice floating around wellness literature.

Conversations around sleep and health have mutated into a practice in over-engineering your sleep architecture by obsessively cataloguing tiny variables and measuring them against largely abstract benchmarks; an exercise which is about as far removed from the concept of rest as can be.

We've transformed a basic biological process into a performance metric, complete with optimisation protocols and enough anxiety to guarantee insomnia. The idea that eight hours of perfect slumber is the difference between a functional human and complete zombie, is actively counterproductive.

Who actually has a ‘normal’ schedule anymore?

When we think of shift work, we picture nurses pulling all-nighters or factory workers yawning through graveyard shifts. Dr Gupta's research takes a broader view: "We include any kind of non-standard work schedule. Even sort of late shifts or early starts like radio presenters... anywhere there's kind of that disruption to sleep wake."

Our economic structures have created multiple categories of people whose biological rhythms are incompatible with when they're expected to function. The breakfast radio presenter getting up at 3am, the parent juggling night shifts with school-age children, the office worker whose evening responsibilities gradually push sleep later; all are wrestling with the same fundamental mismatch.

"Many shift workers just accept things like being perpetually tired or low, because that’s what they understand shift work to be," Dr Gupta says. We've created a world where sleeping at the ‘wrong’ time is both economically necessary and culturally pathologised. So what to do?

Two simple tricks for circadian control

Here's the good news about circadian disruption: your rhythm can’t be permanently broken. Dr Gupta's research shows most people can reset their sleep-wake cycle in two to three days, assuming they understand the mechanisms underpinning sleep; so forget about using willpower (you’re too tired and; it’s futile) and set your sights on the classic wielder of real power: knowledge.

"Light is the real key driver," Dr Gupta explains. When you want to change your sleep schedule, you need light exposure at the time you want to be awake and darkness when you want to sleep, which sounds obvious until you consider the practical complexities of controlling the sun.

This is where standard sleep hygiene advice can sound like fortune cookie therapy. "Don't look at screens before bed" becomes comically irrelevant when you're driving home from a night shift at sunrise, your retinas flooding with photons specifically designed to wake you up.

The best practical tools to simulate night-like conditions are the following, which Dr Gupta endorses as worthwhile investments: blackout curtains, a great eye mask, sleep-specific earplugs and blue-light blocking glasses.

Conversely, if you’re trying to nudge your body into a more alert state as you try to transition to waking up in the morning (when you’d typically be dead asleep) and staying awake all day, simply go outside as soon as you wake up and let the daylight work on you for ten minutes.

And light isn't your only option. "Food is another one that is a big signal for our body," says Dr Gupta. Meal timing functions as a secondary circadian cue. If you're trying to reset after shift work, eating at the times you want your body to recognise as ‘daytime' reinforces the message that you're changing schedules.

Don't overcomplicate it

The most ineffective thing you can do is try to optimise every variable. Dr Gupta sees this constantly in her clinical work: people jumping straight to medications and supplements while maintaining alarming coffee habits and light exposure patterns that whisper promises of insomnia.

“Someone might say ‘oh, I have my last coffee at 5pm’, and then I have dinner at 9pm and want to get to bed at 10pm and I sit in the bright light of my living room," she says, describing a routine that's essentially biochemical self-sabotage. “Let’s deal with some of these before we go to medications."

That said, even Dr Gupta admits to sleep hygiene crimes, "I definitely don't listen to all the advice that I would give people," she laughs, describing drinking coffee during a 4pm interview while simultaneously advising against afternoon caffeine. "At least I have that awareness and can work with it.”

Perfect adherence to sleep hygiene protocols don’t guarantee perfect outcomes, but getting the fundamentals right gives you a solid foundation upon which you can be a little delinquent.

When to maintain your unusual schedule (and when to abandon it)

If you work shifts, you've confronted this dilemma – maintain your work sleep schedule during time off, or flip back to conventional hours? Dr Gupta's answer is pragmatic: there’s no perfect solution.

"For most people it's kind of trying to immediately flip back to your normal daytime schedule," she acknowledges, noting that maintaining night-shift hours during days off often isn't feasible when you've "packed in all the life things that you need to get done."

So, should you live like a vampire on your weekends? For short breaks (one or two days), flipping back to the day schedule might be worth the disruption. For longer breaks, transitioning back to daytime living usually makes more sense, even knowing that the first shift back will be rough.

When to really worry

The assumption that everyone should naturally sleep eight hours from 10pm to 6am isn't scientifically grounded, it emerged around industrial work patterns. We've internalised this schedule as natural, to the point where deviation feels like wrongdoing or an invitation to poor health.

Dr Gupta rejects this belief: "Don't just accept things because of shift work. Really, check in with yourself and your body as much as non shift workers would."

Warning signs that do deserve attention include regularly having near-misses or falling asleep while driving home from work, developing metabolic changes or significant mood shifts. Still, these things aren't the inevitable consequences of non-standard schedules, they’re dramatic signals that your current approach to sleep needs review.

The phone-in-bed exception

Find strategies that work within your actual constraints. This means lowering your expectations. What if staring at your phone in bed is what helps you get to sleep? Instead of freaking out, ‘Oh no, I’m violating the Light Law!’ consider that this is a net positive.

Dr Gupta says she uses her phone in bed to quiet busy thoughts, even though it goes against usual sleep hygiene guides: “It’s about making it work in the best way you can."

The goal is understanding what works for your situation, not following abstract rules designed for imaginary people with perfect environments.

Focus on what you can truly control: your environment where possible, strategic light exposure, meal timing and caffeine scheduling. Trying to get everything perfectly aligned can create the exact kind of anxious rumination that prevents sleep. Know that no matter how off the rails your sleep schedule has gone, it can always be fixed.