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from the sun-is-the-same-in-a-relative-way dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A group of researchers in the UK affiliated with the BSS (British Sleep Society) published a paper this week calling for the permanent abolition of Daylight Saving Time (DST) and adherence to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in large part because modern evidence suggests having that extra hour of sunlight in the evenings is worse for our health than we thought back in the 1970s when the concept was all the rage in Europe.
Not only does GMT more closely align with the natural day/light cycle in the UK, the boffins assert, but decades of research into sleep and circadian rhythms have been produced since DST was enacted that have yet to be considered.
The human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle our bodies go through, drives a lot about our health beyond sleep. It regulates hormone release, gene expression, metabolism, mood (who isn't grumpier when waking up in January?), and the like. In short, it's important. Messing with that rhythm by forcing ourselves out of bed earlier for several months out of the year can have lasting effects, the researchers said.
According to their review of recent research, having light trigger our circadian rhythms in the mornings to wake us up is far more important than an extra hour of light in the evenings. In fact, contrary to the belief that an extra hour of light in the evenings is beneficial, it might actually cause health problems by, again, mucking about with the human body's understanding of what time it is and how we ought to feel about it.
"Disruption of the daily synchronization of our body clocks causes disturbances in our physiology and behavior … which leads to negative short and long-term physical and mental health outcomes," the authors said.
That, and we've just plain fooled ourselves into thinking it benefits us in any real way.
[...] And for the love of sleep, the researchers beg, don't spring forward permanently.
"Mornings are the time when our body clocks have the greatest need for light to stay in sync," said Dr Megan Crawford, lead author and senior lecturer in psychology at University of Strathclyde. "At our latitudes there is simply no spare daylight to save during the winter months and given the choice between natural light in the morning and natural light in the afternoon, the scientific evidence favors light in the morning."
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Thursday October 31 2024, @03:51PM
The solution of messing with a nations clocks a couple times per year seems wildly overcomplicated compared to merely changing posted hour one time permanently to make everyone permanently "happy" or "happier" anyway.
If the sun rises at X o'clock where you live and you want to drive to work in the sun just change the required arrival time to around (X+1) o'clock. It seems shockingly simple once pointed out...
I have talked to old people and some in that generation had a numerical fixation on precisely 9-5. If the government defined "9" as local midnight those old timers would get up at midnight and grumble but certainly never do anything to change the problem of having to wake up at local midnight, because that's a "9" and that specific numeral all that matters. Like the gag from the movie "spinal tap" where all that matters is their amplifier has a dial that goes up to "11". I don't really care on some kind of numerological astrological plane if the number on a schedule or project plan is 8-7 or 10-9 or 10-6 or whatever. I mean I'd like to know ahead of time and there's scheduling issues and five 8s vs four 10s, etc, but I have no numerological worship of the "9", so I don't care personally.
I've been thinking about the paragraph above and this might just be one of those things where once the WWII and baby boomer generations die off the younger generations will scrap daylight savings time without a care. As a member of the younger generations, I work on the opposite side of the planet but for uninteresting reasons, I used to start work at 1000 UTC. Nothing horrible happened because I went to work around "10 UTC" instead of "9". Well during non-DST it was not 1000 UTC but you know what I mean. It was pretty darn early in my local time zone, being on the opposite side of the planet from UTC, but that's what I needed in life at that time.