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Key points
- Daylight savings doesn’t save daylight—it merely time-shifts.
- Americans widely detest being forced to reset the clock twice a year. 75 percent prefer to end the practice, according to a U Chicago poll.
- Our bodies may never adjust physically to DST, reducing sleep by 19 minutes per night until standard time is returns.
Over millennia we evolved on a rotating planet where the length of daylight is determined by the earth’s annual position around the sun and the constantly changing tilt of its axis. By contrast, politicians are very recent additions.
Americans widely detest being forced to reset the clock twice a year. 75 percent prefer to end the practice, according to a University of Chicago poll taken this past October. What people remain divided about is whether the country should have an early sunrise or a late sunset.
Changing our clocks is a century-old practice. As I discussed in several previous columns, shifting time twice a year is associated with an increase in morbid events from heart attacks and miscarriages to fatal accidents and workplace injuries. The debate rages over whether the healthiest solution is to abandon daylight savings time (DST) or make it year-round.
Unfortunately, locking the clock to permanent DST has gained momentum among lawmakers. They mistakenly base their preference on economics. They imagine that an extra era hour of afternoon sunlight year-round is good for business.
Such an unnatural time switch alarms sleep experts and neuroscientists such as myself because politicians would ignorantly rip our natural circadian clocks from the rhythm of daily life as determined by the sun overhead. Settling for standard time would maintain the relationship between clock time and sun time—12 p.m. being “high noon” everywhere when the sun is directly overhead.
The science and biology of the question dictates leaving the clock on standard time, not an hour ahead. A number of sleep studies document cumulative deficits that result from decoupling daily social life from the overhead position of the sun.
DST used to start the first Sunday in April and ended the last Sunday in September—we had six months each of DST and standard time (remember trick-or-treating in the dark?). Perhaps the mission creep over the years has finally gotten on everyone's nerves.
One study found that our bodies never adjust physically to daylight saving time, reducing sleep by 19 minutes per night until standard time is restored.
Alas, know-nothing politicians are winning their cause. So far, 19 states have passed bills to switch to year-round daylight saving time. Another 22 are considering it this year.
Politicians see tinkering with the clock as a winning issue, and they love to meddle. In the decades since daylight saving time became standardized in 1966, Congress gradually extended it from six to eight months. It moved the U.S. to year-round daylight saving time only once, during the 1974 energy crisis, an experiment that was a disaster.
The change proved highly unpopular once workers and schoolchildren were forced to trudge through longer, darker, and colder winter mornings. Support for permanent DST segues into strong opposition once this reality becomes clear.
School officials are also reluctant to embrace a permanent shift. Not only does it leave students walking to bus stops in the dark during the shortest days of winter but it also negates efforts to delay school start times that aim to align with decades of research showing that students, especially high-schoolers, need more sleep.
There is a worldwide movement to abolish resetting the clock. Of the 143 countries that ever tried daylight saving time, nearly half have abandoned it.1
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