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# One night in a tent resets your body clock
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/one-night-in-a-tent/
- Published: 2026-09-29T20:11:47.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T20:19:44.000Z
- Description: A weekend under the sky moves your body clock most of the way back to sunrise, and a review of 108 brain studies shows the stress circuits settling within minutes. Here is a place an hour and a half from Sydney to try it.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Explore, All stories

Somewhere between the last of the phone light and the first of the birds, something in the body lets go. Kenneth Wright, a sleep scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, has measured it. In 2013 his team sent people camping for a week with no torches or screens and found their body clocks had moved fully back to sunrise and sunset. In 2017 he tried the short version: nine volunteers spent one summer weekend in a tent, and came home with melatonin rising 1.4 hours earlier than before, 69 per cent of what the full week had done. What resets the clock, he says, is simply a bright day followed by a truly dark night. This January Constanza Baquedano and Mar Estarellas, working across McGill University and Adolfo Ibanez University in Chile, gathered 108 brain imaging studies of people in nature into one review. Across all of them the same cascade appears: the heart slows, breathing deepens, the amygdala quietens, and the part of the brain that chews over worries goes quiet. Three minutes shows on a scan. A night shows in the morning.

You do not need a wilderness. Little Beach, in Bouddi National Park on the Central Coast, is about ninety minutes from Sydney and 750 metres on foot from the Grahame Drive car park: six tent sites tucked into littoral rainforest at the edge of the sand, a toilet, a sheltered barbecue, no drinking water, so you carry your own. Bookings are online through NSW National Parks, and the Bouddi coastal walk runs past the door for the morning. Pitch the tent facing east. Put the phone in the bottom of the pack at dusk and leave it there. Let the light arrive on its own schedule. By the time the kettle is on, your body will have done what the scientists measured: slid an hour or so back toward the sun, and set the worrying part of the brain down for a while. Then walk home along the cliffs, and see how long it lasts.

### Sources and links

Our short take: from the University of Colorado Boulder studies led by Kenneth Wright (Current Biology, 2013 and 2017) and the review by Baquedano, Estarellas and colleagues in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (January 2026). Campground facts from NSW National Parks. Photograph: Unsplash.

- [University of Colorado Boulder, a wilderness weekend resets the clock](https://www.colorado.edu/today/2017/02/01/cant-get-sleep-wilderness-weekend-can-help)
- [EurekAlert, how stepping into nature affects the brain](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1117859)
- [NSW National Parks, Little Beach campground, Bouddi](https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/camping-and-accommodation/campgrounds/little-beach-campground)