A method and apparatus for recovery from discontinuous reception desynchronization, the method having the steps of: determining a most recent time that an explicit message indicating a change from an old discontinuous reception period to a new discontinuous reception period was sent; adding to the most recent time that the explicit message was sent the old discontinuous reception period multiplied by an integer, where the integer is selected to ensure the results of the adding step occur after a present time; and sending a continuous reception command at the time found in the adding step.