Daylight Savings Time Hoax
Daylight savings time impacts our natural rhythm negatively.
Someone once indicated that by cutting one foot off one end of a blanket and sewing it to the other end will not make the blanket longer.
Springing forward doesn’t just make you more sleepy Monday morning; it also affects your health and your safety.
Just one hour of a time change can make it harder to wake up and fall asleep on a set schedule. Immediately following the “spring ahead” time shift, people can find it difficult to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning. This leads to less hours of sleep overall, and that sleep deprivation poses safety risks, including a higher likelihood of motor vehicle accidents on days following the time shift.
Light is the most powerful regulator of our internal clock, also known as our circadian rhythm, and some people do not adjust to the time change after several months. When the clocks on the wall move forward, our exposure to morning sunlight in the morning is reduced, which makes it harder to wake up, and our exposure to evening light increases, which makes it harder to fall asleep. Chronic misalignment between the internal clock and occupational, family and social activities can be very disruptive.
One of the primary concerns surrounding DST is its intense impact on our social and body clock alignment. This affects our habits and routines that are automatic decisions which, even when we anticipate clock changes, still impact our well being. DST imposes biannual time shifts that create short-term disorientation and fatigue which can affect workplace productivity and increasing the risk of accidents. This is evidenced by spikes in medical errors and traffic accidents following DST transitions. It is amplified in older age and among family members who are more sensitive to daily routines.
The abrupt time shift disrupts sleep patterns, contributing to widespread sleep deprivation. There are surveys which indicate that if given an extra hour, most individuals would use it for sleep, highlighting the chronic sleep deficit prevalent in societies adhering to DST. Among miners working in the US, for example, the one-hour time change induced by DST has been associated with a decrease in sleep of around 40 minutes (Barnes and Wagner 2009). This sleep deprivation is not merely inconvenient but has cascading effects on mental health, contributing to higher rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
The switch to DST varies across geographical regions and climates. Only around one-third of countries worldwide observe it, with most of these located in Europe. In the USA, some states and regions do not observe DST (e.g. Hawaii, most of Arizona, Indiana, Puerto Rico). Similarly, Australia, Brazil, and Canada have regions that opt out (e.g. Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Christmas Island, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in Australia). Even within Europe, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Iceland, Russia, and Turkey do not follow the practice.
Contrary to its original purpose of conserving energy, the effects of DST on energy consumption are ambiguous at best and negative at worst. The modern era’s reliance on air conditioning and artificial lighting has mitigated any marginal gains from daylight extension during the evening. Instead, the biannual time shifts contribute to increased energy use during transitions and disrupt natural energy consumption patterns, thereby compounding environmental costs rather than alleviating them.