Like much of the rest of the country, we suspect, we have mixed feelings about daylight saving time. Although the enervating gloom in which we awoke this morning was a poor start to the week, we remembered that it’s only temporary, and we can look forward to an extra measure of daylight in the evenings.
Daylight saving time, the seasonal adjustment to our clocks, began at 2 a.m. Sunday and will end at the same time on Nov. 2. The thinking behind DST is that most people are more active in the afternoons and evenings than in the morning, and that an extra hour of daylight at night would be helpful. Originally suggested (in jest) by the late-rising Benjamin Franklin, daylight saving time was first adopted during World War I as a wartime energy saving measure. After farmers lobbied against the clock change, daylight saving time was abandoned until WWII, and it has intermittently been a part of American life ever since — depending on where you live, at least, as adoption has varied. Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico don’t recognize DST.
We have yet to meet an ardent supporter of daylight saving time, and there appears to be more people opposed than in favor of it. Every couple of years, a bill passes one house of Congress or the other, but promptly disappears before any action is taken. It was briefly rolled back in the 1970s, but it didn’t last very long. We suspect politicians don’t want to repeat the past.
There are valid arguments against the practice. Even the old canard that daylight saving time saves energy is less-than-certain — a 2008 paper found that daylight saving time actually increased energy costs in Indiana by $9 million a year.
Our bodies are programmed to follow patterns of sleep and wakefulness that are determined, in large part, by the cycles of light and dark. Upsetting that cycle throws off our bodies, which don’t care what the clock says.
Studies have shown that American workers lose, on average, about 40 minutes of sleep due to the clock change, and such widespread sleep deprivation has very real effects. A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that there will likely be an uptick in workplace injuries today due to that sleep loss. Fatigue could also have a deleterious effect on workplace productivity, which has costs, as well. There is also an uptick in traffic accidents on the Monday immediately following the clock change, with an increase of up to 6 percent for the week following the change, studies have shown.
One employee who stopped by our office this morning reflected on his young daughter’s loss of sleep and the potential negative effects it might have on her behavior in school. If that’s part of a larger pattern, we don’t envy teachers’ predicament today. Meanwhile, more children are waiting for the bus or walking to school in gloomy half-light, which could be dangerous with all those tired drivers on the road. Additionally, children are found to perform better in school later in the morning, and shifting the day an hour earlier certainly won’t help their tired brains absorb new information.
While we can’t endorse some New England lawmakers’ push to move their states from Eastern Standard Time to the hour-earlier Atlantic Time — they’d be out-of-synch with the rest of the Eastern seaboard, which would generate numerous problems — we think that, as a country, we should have a serious discussion about doing away with daylight saving time. It would simply make things simpler, and perhaps a little safer, as well. However, we don’t think that’s very likely to happen, as it would be a very large change, and people don’t always like change, do they?
We can think of one benefit of the daylight saving time switch — it’s an excellent biannual reminder to check batteries in smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms. Please remember to check and replace batteries in those devices as needed, if you haven’t already.
