Struggling With the Time Change

/

I’ve really been struggling with the recent ‘spring ahead’ time change to Daylight Saving Time. For some reason, that one hour has really thrown me off my schedule and after a week, I’m still feeling off. We had been waking early… around 5:30-ish when the day was starting to lighten up. Up until the time change, we were up reading the paper and having coffee no later than 6am, but it’s been a challenge getting up that early now when it’s still so dark. I feel jet-lagged. My biological clock is all mixed up. My circadian rhythm is all messed up. I’m tired by mid-afternoon. That’s what happens when this girl gets just a 23-hour day.

From childhood, I was told we originally began changing the clocks in Spring and Fall to benefit farmers, but that’s a myth. Actually, farmers don’t benefit from it at all and would prefer to leave the clocks alone. Their day is pretty much dictated by daylight and the sun. Livestock have their own natural rhythms governed by daylight. Chickens and cows do not adhere to clock changes.

From BritannicaProCon.org, “DST was implemented in the United States nationally on March 31, 1918, as a wartime effort to save an hour’s worth of fuel (gas or oil) each day to light lamps and coal to heat homes. It was repealed nationwide in 1919, and then maintained by some individual localities (such as New York City) in what Time Magazine called “a chaos of clocks” until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act made DST consistent nationwide.”

“DST has been “permanently” implemented nationwide twice, once during World War II and once in the 1970s. In the winter of 1973-1974, DST was used to conserve fuel during the energy crisis.”

There are definitely pros and cons to using Daylight Saving Time.

The Pros:

  • Longer daylight hours promote safety. They make driving safer, lower accident rates, and lower the risk of pedestrians getting hit by a car. Daylight in the evening makes it safer for joggers, dog walkers, and kids playing outside. Additionally, some economists maintain that robberies drop about 27% in the evening hours after the spring time change since, they claim, most street crime occurs in the evening between 5-8 pm. It’s harder to pull off a crime in the daylight.

  • Daylight Saving Time is good for the economy. More people tend to shop and go out to restaurants after work when it’s still light out.

  • DST encourages a healthier lifestyle. People tend to get out in the evenings and engage in outdoor activities rather than stay in and watch TV.

    The Cons:

  • Clock changes are bad for your health. Losing one hour of sleep upsets a person’s natural circadian rhythm which affects them negatively. Researchers have reported increases in heart attacks and cluster headaches following the time changes. Also, auto and workplace accidents reportedly increase and more fatal car accidents occur in the days following the spring time change.

  • Productivity drops following the spring time change because workers feel sleep deprived… because they are.

  • One economist estimates that the act of changing all the clocks in your house costs Americans “~$1.7 billion in lost opportunity cost based on average hourly wages, i.e. the 10 or so minutes spent moving devices forward and backward twice a year could be spent on something more productive”.

Some food for thought!

A few DST factoids:

  • DST is generally not observed near the Equator, where sunrise and sunset times do not vary enough to justify it or at higher latitudes where the sun disappears for months at a time and then doesn’t set at all at other times. An hour's time change would do nothing for these folks.

  • Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, was the first city in the world to enact DST, on 1 July 1908.

  • Canada has used DST the longest, at 111 years; the U.S. has used DST for 106 years.

  • 71 countries used Daylight Saving Time in 2023, while 9 countries used DST in some jurisdictions and not others (like the United States).

  • In 1916, Germany became the first country to adopt Daylight Saving Time officially as an effort to conserve coal during WWl.

On March 16, 2022, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a measure called the Sunshine Protection Act which would have made Daylight Saving Time permanent… no more clock changes. (Spoiler alert: it was kind of a surprise vote and several senators weren’t present for the voice vote.) The House of Representatives, however, never brought it to a vote, so it never passed.

So we’ll fall behind again on November 5th, 2023. At least I’ll get my hour back!

What are your thoughts on DST? Keep changing clocks? Make DST permanent? Get rid of DST?