Time For Change? The Controversy Surrounding Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time, also abbreviated as DST, was the practice of adjusting the clock forward one hour from the standard time during the summer months and vice versa, setting the clock backward one hour during the winter months. This troublesome practice served the purpose of “making better use of natural daylight” since winter has longer nights and shorter days. People just need that extra hour to squeeze in whatever it is that they have to do, balancing out the amount of daytime between summer and winter months in a delusionally consistent pattern. Aside from inconveniently scavenging the house for battery-powered clocks and twisting the knobs five times to the right hour, it’s a relief that modern devices jump the hour automatically depending on the user’s geographical location. Who would have ever thought there could be an impact on personal health and performance throughout the seemingly innocent process? Or is it only the researcher’s exaggeration of DST’s detrimental effect on the body’s homeostasis to abandon the tiresome routine of playing with their clocks? Based on overall considerations, is there a necessity to continue following such a traditional ritual for our generation?

DST Health Influences— It’s Not That Bad

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), their report has found that 63% of Americans want to throw DST out of the window with the primary reasoning being more than 55% of the responders experience tiredness which includes 14% who responded feeling “extremely tired”. To make daylight savings appear ten times more intimidating, a professor of mental health Adam Spira claimed, “Scientific evidence points to adverse health consequences from changing the clock, including in heart attacks, strokes, mood disturbances, and hospital admission rates.” It was amazingly fast how the insisting harmful results can escalate. It was like sending out a resonating siren that if DST continues for another three to five years a quarter of the population living in the daylight saving zone is going to be wiped out from the face of the earth. Equally ominous as its ambiguity, what leads to health practitioners spreading these precautions just for a painless transition of time with the physical sacrifice of, at maximum, moving our arms to reach for the clocks?

The most concrete and widespread opinion of the negative effect of DST as proclaimed by almost all who stand against the convention was that DST disrupts the circadian rhythms (nicknamed our internal biological clock). Fundamentally, a major task of the network of brain signals that constitutes the rhythm is to ensure each individual creates their own sleep and wake patterns. The process of forming sleeping habits was based on light exposure as received by the light receptors (cones and rods) in the eyes behind the retina. By pushing the time one hour back during the winter, it is a subtle but highly effective encouragement for people to spend their extra evening time outdoors or engaging in more stimulating activities that may wake up the brain when it should be preparing to rejuvenate, relax, and plunge into rest. It may not sound like it matters an ample deal, but it was ironic when people advocate so extensively the importance of prohibiting technological use at least half an hour before bedtime. The exposure to natural light before sleeping worked similarly compared to artificial light; it’s no more beneficial and easier in terms of falling into asleep because the production of sleep hormone— melatonin will be delayed with more light contact. In contrast, shorter nights during the summer as the clock moves one hour forward act as a minor confiscation of sleep quantity, and for some people, even one hour of sleep deprivation as compared to the usual was enough to lower the production of serotonin, the mood enhancement hormone which potentially causes a mixture of grogginess and foul temperament.

From here, all the diversity of common illnesses branched out from one central problem— sleep insufficiency. Not even one medical complication should be excluded from what was mentioned above: cardiovascular diseases, fatigue, and snappy attitude can all be the result of a night’s tempest sleep but just as our common sense permits, so do most other problems in our body can be blamed more or less on sleeping issues. This posed an awkward suspicion about the listed symptoms since they are no less prevalent in places where people don’t have to change the clock throughout the year. In places in the central part of the globe that just matched with the standard time annually, there is no current evidence that supported people living by regions of standard time wouldn’t be nearly as tired as those customizing to DST based on the seasons. Under all those tangles and messes, if DST was merely abolished owing to two insignificant sleep adaptations throughout the year that perhaps imposed a risk of developing short-term insomnia, it’s more likely the individuals in our generation will suffer from an amalgam of reasons causing the inability to sleep well independent of DST alone. If that’s the only pillar justifying why the practice should be nullified, hypothetically and empathetically speaking at the same time, I guess the person who proposed the idea of DST would be pretty upset.

DST’s Outdated Purpose— Not Bad But Pretty Useless

From the perspective of today, most people probably don’t regard the extension or shortening of one hour as all that substantial. Most of us discover our lives staying the same before and after DST if we were to neglect possible studies on health. So why was the idea of DST implemented in the first place? During World War II, when conflicts rendered many countries lingering on the edge of economic stress (if they had not yet collapsed already), people raised a cascade of money-saving strategies trying to accumulate as much salary as possible for food and livelihood necessities. On the consumer side, people stopped buying candles and light bulbs, while on the producer’s end there simply was not enough material to make candles and bulbs, because the priority is to support the war effort in societies. Therefore, many predicted that it was wise to start a greater use of natural daylight by changing the clock since why not just go to sleep when days turn dark without illumination from any light source since it’s not possible to be productive anyway? But what they did not anticipate was this war-accommodating tradition continued throughout centuries for certain places though without its helpful qualities because a few bucks for new LED lights or scented candles now doesn’t cost an arm and a leg for the majority.

Alternatively, nowadays we emphasize the importance of energy conservation not because we have to, but because it’s the type of public-spirited conduct worth our diligence (or the planet suffers). But does DST actually help save a considerable portion of our household energy consumption just like what the World War II agenda once promised? As societies evolved, light energy constituted the smallest part of an average family’s energy use. Although DST could have reduced people’s daily activities by one hour during the summer, the extension during the winter months makes a net conservation of zero hours. However, on a more optimistic scale, if some people do maintain the habit of sleeping one hour earlier for the entire year regardless in an attempt to cut down the time for a lamp to shine and a bulb to beam, the conserved energy is not even more than the energy waste from people using more air-conditioning and heating for an hour. According to an article in the International Association For Energy Economics, ever since Americans started observing DST in 1917, for the next sixty years until 1976, the repertoire of saved energy only changed by 1%. It was a sufficient number of years by that time people realized DST was not environmentally useful at all. Some places even found their energy usage rocketed upward for those years due to many other ways of energy outlets, not lighting.

Should Daylight Saving Time Be Abolished?

Ultimately, DST’s health effect by itself is not an adequately valid reason for us to get rid of the time-managing system, however, there’s also not much benefit or further proof of advantages for us to keep it because the exchange of one hour of daylight and nighttime cannot make our lives better or worse without supremacy in energy conservation. Comparing the amount of data and viewpoints of DST, both investigative specialists and irritated sleepyheads seemed to have a stronger voice in the eradication movement. Not only is evidence connected with disorientated sleeping habits, but also sleep inertia, which is a transient period of low performance and unstable mood shortly after waking up. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that during school days after DST, on average, students behave more lethargically, listen less attentively, are more reluctant to participate, and respond with a slower reaction rate, contributing to classes of unproductivity and procrastination. Furthermore, to antagonize DST in well-rounded dimensions, there is a surprising increase in the number and severity of car collisions among early and late-night workers the day after the time change. Explanations encompassed a greater risk of drowsy driving, poor visibility if the day remained dark when it’s the peak traffic times and altered time schedules may likely influence a person’s sense of time management leading to rushed driving, etc. People could have doubted the truthfulness of the research and mused over some of the outlandishly weak connections DST could have exerted on us, but these were probably enough to prove DST was losing popularity among the general public. Perhaps against our pleasure, but the appeal to exterminate DST is readily progressing into many government’s legislative re-assessment. Senator Rick Scott of Florida boldly argued, “Changing the clock twice a year is outdated and unnecessary.” His remarks triumphantly induced a robust discussion and evaluation of his ideas in many DST-employed regions. It’s possible that a few years later from now on, daylight saving time will be no more than conducting time measurement with a sundial in ancient Rome.

References

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/7-things-to-know-about-daylight-saving-time

https://aasm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/sleep-prioritization-survey-2019-spring-daylight-saving-time-resu lts.pdf https://aasm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/sleep-prioritization-survey-2020-elimination-seasonal-time-chang es-results.pdf https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-dark-side-of-daylight-saving-time https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.4938?_ga=2.231897951.1537672932.1678225202-1988408101.1678 225202

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/circadian-rhythm/daylight-saving-time

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-benjamin-franklin-invent-daylight-savings-time-1232015/ https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-the-end-of-daylight-savings-time-can-impact-your-health#Health- effects-of-seasonal-changes

https://www.dallas-sleep.com/blog/5-good-reasons-for-getting-rid-of-daylight-saving-time https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4291107-daylight-saving-time-2023-why-attempts-to-make- observation-permanent-failed/​