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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 When we move our clocks forward an hour, noon no longer represents when the sun is near its highest point in the sky.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: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Sunday November 20 2022, @04:07PM (2 children)
Different pros and cons at different locations.
Here in the UK we've been back on standard time for 3 weeks or so - where I am sunrise is 07:36 and sunset about 16:06 so for most of the winter people would be getting up in the dark, traveling to work/school at the crack of dawn and coming home in the dark however much you dick around with the clock. For much of the summer, without DST, sunrise would be around 3-5AM standard time, and putting the clock forward an hour still means getting up in daylight. Personally I'd vote for "permanent DST" - YMMV (especially if you live in Scotland) but even permanent GMT would avoid the biannual does of jet lag and the sudden whammy of dark evenings in October. When theres such a wide variation, changing only really makes a practical difference for a month or so around the equinoxes.
Really, I think we just need either more time zones or more flexible working/business hours (much easier with modern tech).
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday November 20 2022, @07:20PM
Up here in the sticks, in the north of Scotland, there's precious little daylight at this time of year. It gets dark early in the afternoons and sunrise isn't until well after breakfast. However, in the summer the sky never quite gets properly dark at night. I really don't like the clocks changing for DST. Having said that, I sometimes think we should just leave the clocks as they are but agree to start work earlier and work longer in the days with more light. I find myself getting very tired when the daylight hours are short. It's a real struggle to keep going through winder solstice.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by fab23 on Sunday November 20 2022, @10:16PM
As far as I know, whole Europe changed back from DST on 30. October this year. At my location before the change the twilight started at around 18:00 (for non-metric readers 6pm), but after the change it already started at 17:00 (for non-metric readers 5pm). This affects a lot of things, e.g. on Friday evening when you leave work and drive home it still was not fully dark, then on Monday you drive home at the same time and it already is completely dark. I don't have a source, but in this first week after the time change more accidents happen.
At least in Europe originally the idea of DST was to conserve electricity as you would need less time to turn the light on at home. But studies showed that there was no measurable difference in usage. EU is currently in the process of getting rid of DST, and as far as I know countries are free to choose their time zone. And in Switzerland (not in the EU, but in Europe) of course the people will have to vote about this change, as they did back in the Eighties. Switzerland was a time island in the middle of Europe not having DST for one year.
So we will see how complicate the time zone will be distributed in Europe in the next few years.
But maybe all this does not matter, as some people are already thinking about only one time zone on the whole planet. In the article The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks [nature.com] they talk about getting rid of the leap second, as there could be a negative one in the future, as the earth rotates faster (see also What Is a Negative Leap Second? [timeanddate.com]). And at the end of the article they also mention this: