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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 When we move our clocks forward an hour, noon no longer represents when the sun is near its highest point in the sky.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) by j-beda on Monday November 21 2022, @02:08PM
This article actually isn't about DST vs SST - it's about school hours.
A whole bunch of conversation around this this topic is framed as "Dark/light is good/bad for these people/activities for these events/situations - therefore we should change the clock twice per year."
This is as stupid AF.
The first part ""Dark/light is good/bad for these people/activities for these events/situations" may very well be true, and even very important. The second part is what is stupid.
Pick a time zone and adjust the time of the activities to match the optimal position of the sun rather than arbitrary numbers on the clock. If the school kids need to adjust their school hours, then do that rather than make the entire nation adjust their hours.
Perhaps China and India have implemented a national time zone stupidly - requiring everyone to start and stop activities simultaneously across the country, but that isn't required you know.
If kids operate better when school starts a bit after dawn - then set the school starting time in your district a bit after dawn! Don't set dawn to be a bit before the school staring time!
Please just stop changing the clocks annually!