Permanent Daylight Saving Time…and Our Health

by Jan Cullinane

Ahhhh… those long, lovely, shimmery summer evenings we enjoy because we “sprung” our clocks forward before we went to bed on March 12, resulting in that extra glorious hour of light. The U.S. Senate has passed a bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, to make daylight saving time (DST) permanent (yes, it’s “saving” and not “savings”), resulting in a darker morning but a longer, lighter evening. If the House of Representatives follows the Senate, and the President signs this bill, it becomes law in fall 2023. What are the consequences of a permanent daylight saving time? Turns out there are important health and safety issues to consider.

A little history: Germany is credited as the first country to implement DST in 1916 to conserve energy during WWI, and the United States adopted DST on March 19, 1918, for similar reasons. But, it wasn’t popular in the U.S., and it was abolished when the war ended. DST was again implemented in 1942 under Franklin Roosevelt, but was discontinued in 1945. It became standard throughout the United States in 1966. States can elect to be exempted from following DST, and currently Arizona (except for the Navajo nation area) and Hawaii don’t observe it.

What’s Good and What’s Bad with the Current System

Pros of daylight saving time include additional time for evening sports and other types of outdoor recreation, which may help counter our sedentary habits, children’s ability to go trickor-treating with more light, fewer evening traffic accidents and reduced pedestrian fatalities, lower crime rate, lower electricity usage (although it’s minimal); and the tourism industry claims the extra evening light provides more opportunities for visitors to be out and about.

Cons include children going to school in the dark, less sleep as we transition to DST (it disrupts our biological clock), additional sleepiness and loss of productivity following the loss of an hour of sleep, and an uptick in the risk and number of strokes, heart attacks, and car crashes.

The Repercussions of Making DST Permanent

Each of us has an internal clock that regulates our sleep cycle. Most of us have experienced the ill effects of staying up all night because of worry, a party, studying for an exam, or getting caught up in a project or completing a work assignment. Our internal clock is governed by the sun, and we have evolved to wake up with the light, and slowly wind down our wakefulness when dark descends. It’s thought this mechanism evolved eons ago to keep us safer from predators, which were usually more active at night.

Permanent DST may result in the misalignment of our normal, genetically-programmed wake/sleep cycles. Since it will be darker in the mornings, we’ll be fighting our internal clock and rising before the sunrise, and the longer, lighter days may entice us to stay up later, also negatively affecting sleep and health. Dr. Nate Watson, professor of neurology at the University of Washington and the co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center, says we lose 19 minutes of sleep for every additional hour of evening light. If you’ve taken an international trip across multiple time zones, you’ve experienced the results of disruptive sleep cycles. Studies of people who work night shifts, fighting against their biological clock, show an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Many researchers believe we should ditch DST completely and stay on standard time year-round; trying to tinker with our biological or “circadian clock” can have long-term consequences since our internal clock is in sync with the change in the amount of light throughout the year.

Although most of us enjoy the additional light that daylight saving time creates, and the idea of a permanent change sounds attractive, remember the old warning from a 1970s commercial that touted a margarine that mimicked the taste of butter: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

Before making this change permanent, we should closely evaluate all sides of this issue. We know there are drawbacks with adjusting to DST as it exists now. Will a permanent change be better, or will we be fighting our internal clocks year-round and negatively affecting our health? The science, unfortunately, seems to indicate we’ll be doing our bodies more harm than good if we go to permanent DST.

Jan Cullinane is an award-winning retirement author, speaker, and consultant. Her just-released book is The New Retirement: The Ultimate Guide to the Rest of Your Life, 3rd edition (Wiley, 2022).