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from the gotta-wake-up-and-smell-the-collective-coffee dept.
Morning light helps keep our internal clocks on track. Daylight saving time throws that off:
Daylight saving time has ended, and most Americans have turned their clocks back an hour. My sixth-grader is in heaven.
At 6:50 a.m. these days, our once testy tween zombie is now ... moderately awake and relatively lucid.
Instead of rising to gauzy predawn light, she's got glowy morning sunshine beaming around her curtains. When she sets off for school, the sun has been up nearly a full hour. Just a 60-minute change has lightened both the morning and her mood. At breakfast today, I think I even spied a smile.
On November 6, every state in the United States except Hawaii and most of Arizona switched from daylight saving time, or DST, to standard time (those two states don't observe DST). That switch shifted an hour of light from the evening to the morning. In March, we'll move in the other direction when we "spring forward," trading morning light for brighter evenings.
The United States' biannual time change has been lighting up headlines since the U.S. Senate's unanimous vote in March to make daylight saving time permanent. The Sunshine Protection Act would forgo turning clocks to and fro, repeating an unpopular experiment Congress tried in the 1970s and prioritizing evening light throughout the year. But the health case for staying on daylight saving time is pretty dim. And what such a shift could mean for adolescents is especially gloomy.
Even the name "daylight saving time" isn't quite right, says Kenneth Wright, a sleep and circadian expert at the University of Colorado Boulder. There's no change in the amount of daylight, he says. "What we're doing is changing how we live relative to the sun." When we move our clocks forward an hour, noon no longer represents when the sun is near its highest point in the sky. Suddenly, people's schedules are solarly out of sync.
That's a big deal biologically, Wright says. Humans evolved with a daily cycle of light and dark. That sets the rhythms of our bodies, from when we sleep and wake to when hormones are released. Morning light, in particular, is a key wake-up signal. When we tinker with time, he says, "we're essentially making the choice: Do we want to go with what we've evolved with, or do we want to alter that?"
From a health perspective, if he had to rank permanent daylight saving time, permanent standard time or our current practice of biannual clock changing, Wright says, "I think the answer is incredibly clear." Permanent standard time is healthiest for humans, he says. In his view, permanent daylight saving time ranks last.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Adam on Sunday November 20 2022, @01:41PM (11 children)
Permanent daylight savings time and permanent regular time are effectively the same - people will adjust their business hours to whatever hours people are inclined to do their shopping or schooling or whatever. If we wanted kids to go to school when the sun is out, we've always had that option. If we're going to pick one, the one that puts the sun overhead at noon makes far more sense.
Daylight savings time was/is all about consistently adjusting schedules across the nation to keep the days start time roughly in line with sunrise. Since sunrise is when people like to or are motivated to get up, that makes sense. Without it, businesses will either haphazardly adjust their operating hours twice annually, or they'll just be out of sync with when people want to do business. Neither are great options.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 20 2022, @01:50PM (2 children)
>Daylight savings time was/is all about consistently adjusting schedules across the nation to keep the days start time roughly in line with sunrise
Granted Florida is an outlier, but here DST equates to commuting in the dark, and an extra hour of business for restaurants and bars which can pack full for sunset because everyone is off work early enough to get out before the sun goes down. IMO it sucks all around, but that has just led me into jobs where start and end hours are flexible, which is far more valuable to me than the number on the clock...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday November 20 2022, @08:38PM (1 child)
There is less value in Daylight Saving as you travel further toward the Equator, as dawn doesn't move enough through the year. By the time you hit the tropics, it's pointless. Florida should really just stick with non-DST.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 20 2022, @09:36PM
Yeah, my first summer in NYC with the 4am sun streaming in the window was a shocker...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 20 2022, @02:55PM (6 children)
FTFY. Basically, it adjusts in a way that results in more daylight in the evening. I can't find the story, but way back when, I read that some supporters of DST were allegedly a "backyard barbeque" lobby.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2022, @03:25PM (1 child)
That's essentially what the Senate legislation was about. This and other studies come to the conclusion that permanent standard time is the best for our bodies, but businesses, and probably a lot of people as well, prefer having some daylight at the end of the day for recreation and shopping.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday November 21 2022, @06:55AM
I feel like the advent of electric lighting has made this concern less acute.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday November 20 2022, @08:49PM (2 children)
This rationale (more daylight at the end of the day) has always annoyed me. Given that we have less daylight hours in winter, surely it would make more sense to apply Daylight Savings then in order to make more use of those meagre hours in the afternoon/evening? What happens instead in summer is that we get a 'double dose' of shifting time to get an extra hour as well as having more sunlight in the first place. Doesn't add up.
What Daylight Saving _does_ do that makes sense is placing sunrise around the same general time throughout the year. As the days get longer, sunrise is shifted so that it occurs around about the same clock hour that it does in winter. This helps our circadian rhythms, which have evolved to work around dawn (much as dairy farmers do regardless of what the clock says).
(Score: 3, Touché) by ChrisMaple on Monday November 21 2022, @05:19AM (1 child)
In the northern contiguous U.S., sunrise and sunset each shift by at least 4 hours from solstice to solstice. No one-hour shift can make up for that.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday November 21 2022, @06:24AM
To be pedantic, it's _up to_ 4 hours depending on your latitude, but point taken. Daylight Saving mitigates the (up to) 4 hour shift without completely eliminating it.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday November 21 2022, @10:20AM
Summer time has been a thing in the UK long before anyone had even heard of the word "barbeque". The ability to do things in the evening for longer in daylight is a more likely explanation, like digging the vegtable patch after work, as many people did in those days.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday November 21 2022, @04:25AM
Not really: If our only goal was to keep the day's start time roughly in line with sunrise, we'd just do that. Or at the very least, use local noon to center our days. The reason we don't do this is that large-scale industry that needs to communicate over long distances finds this inconvenient.
Also worth mentioning here is that the question of which time zone you're in is often much more about politics than it is about the sun. For example, at the border between China in the far west and their neighbors Pakistan and Tajikistan, time jumps 3 hours. That's not a reflection of solar anything, that's a reflection of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party didn't want to have separate time zones in their country so they just didn't and instead picked one time for their entire country. Or in Galicia, Spain, the time is an hour ahead of GMT despite being significantly west of Greenwich, because that enables them to have the same time zone as most of the rest of the EU.
It's a big complicated mess, and if you really want to go on a journey about it, read some of the files that are part of the IANA time zone database, the comments will explain in great detail in some cases what's going on with a particular time zone and why.
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