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posted by hubie on Sunday November 20 2022, @12:41PM   Printer-friendly
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 When we move our clocks forward an hour, noon no longer represents when the sun is near its highest point in the sky.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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday November 21 2022, @04:25AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday November 21 2022, @04:25AM (#1280756)

    Daylight savings time was/is all about consistently adjusting schedules across the nation to keep the days start time roughly in line with sunrise.

    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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