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Health Experts Want to Stop Daylight-Saving Time
- wdr1 7y agoI don't want to stop Daylight Saving Time. I want it year round. The quirk, due to the Uniform Time Act, is that States have a choice -- either never use DST or only use DST during Spring/Summer dates stipulated by Congress.
- rekabis 7y agoAs long as we can all agree to stick to standard time, I will be all for any such motion. If you want to go to permanent DST, that’s gonna have to be a hard no from me, dawg. I’d rather suffer continued switching of hours than move to permanent DST.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Max_aaa 7y agoAs someone who lives in NZ and works in the US market, I cannot wait for this to end. As every year I have 4 time switches.
- jobigoud 7y agoI have missed a certain weekly meeting twice in the past few years during that specific week where Europe has changed hours but the US hasn't...
- hyfgfh 7y agoYou know you could change your working yours instead of changing "time". Nope. Lets change time twice a year cause health problems, IT problems, car accidents. Its already time to use a global time and stop with this bs of timezones. Timezones are an unreliable way to measure time the relation between time space.
- bsagdiyev 7y agoBut is a great way to give sunlight hours a normal schedule regardless of DST. Global time makes zero sense, like literally none.
- jachee 7y ago13:00:00.00Z means the same moment wherever you are on (or off) the planet. Does that help it make sense?
- new_realist 7y agoNo, because people use local time to decide when to go to bed, and when to get up. Aligning that to the sun is the most important bit. Asking your smartphone what time it is somewhere else is trivially easy no matter what method you use.
- pishpash 7y agoPeople used to not have any time and watched the sun. I'm sure they can adapt to their local working hours, even if it's 13:00-22:00.
- CameronNemo 7y ago> people use local time to decide when to go to bed, and when to get up. Aligning that to the sun is the most important bit. And yet, this is what DST gets so damn wrong.
- hyfgfh 7y agohttps://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5970767/case-against-time-zones https://www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5970767/case-against-time-zones
- tzs 7y ago> Its already time to use a global time and stop with this bs of timezones. Timezones are an unreliable way to measure time the relation between time space Time zones exist because the Earth is roughly spherical. Going to global time does not change this, and so does not remove the need for time zones.
- TwoBit 7y agoThe title here implies that there's a consensus among "health experts", but there is no such thing. Click bait. All we have is some health experts saying there are downsides to the back and forth switch
- James_Henry 7y agoDo you know of health experts who explain the benefits of DST? I'm interested in their arguments.
- taborj 7y agoI think the point is there are health experts who want to stop DST, and there are health experts who are ambivalent. It's disingenuous to say that "health experts" want something if not all - or even the majority - actively want it.
- James_Henry 7y agoWith a field as large as "health experts" it would be a bit much to ask for a majority. Do you think that the many health experts, the fact that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is publishing a DST position statement, and the long list of chronobiologist societies doesn't suggest there is a pretty good consensus? You will always have a ton of ambivalent health experts on the matter because for most health experts this isn't their field.
- throw0101a 7y agoVarious societies of chronobiologists recommend getting rid of DST: * https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/ * http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-DST.pdf http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D... * https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-circadian-clock/ https://www.chronobiology.com/impact-daylight-saving-time-ci... * https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commission_on_DST.pdf https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss... * https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/askscience_ama_series_we_are_researchers_studying/ https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dq2nv3/askscien... * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
- bhauer 7y agoGood reasons, for sure. And engineers want to stop changing clocks twice a year for other good reasons. And many laypeople want to stop changing clocks twice a year because it's bothersome and tiresome. I don't particularly care which time zone is ultimately selected for my state; I just want it to be fixed year-round.
- scirocco 7y agoAnd I have to change time everytime my watch has been laying still two days...
- 0x445442 7y agoI thought that too until I moved to Arizona and I can say I hate the fixed time because work hours typically don't adjust with the sun. Summer is worse for me than winter because I have a tougher time getting a good nights sleep due to the sun rising so early. What I've discovered about myself is that I could never live in Alaska because I'd probably be an insomniac in the summer.
- PossiblyKyle 7y agoPerhaps obvious but have you tried sleeping in pitch black and/or with eye cover? If you need natural light to wake up you might be able to sleep very well in the dark and mimic it with an ambient light alarm clock
- jachee 7y agoTime is relative, and "noon" is irrelevant. UTC everywhere is optimal and ideal.
- edflsafoiewq 7y agohttps://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- new_realist 7y agoEveryone has a smartphone these days. There should be fifty time zones in the US, and your smartphones should adjust the time by a few minutes every night so that sunrise is always at 7 am, which mimics what would occur naturally. When you want to know the time elsewhere, you ask Siri. That should make humans much healthier by keeping circadian rhythms naturally aligned, not under continuous stress from artificial UTC, or even DST.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ianai 7y agoCould a US president change this unilaterally?
- paxys 7y agoVia an executive order, probably. Call it a public health crisis or whatever. It has been done before - https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-emergency-daylight-saving-time-energy-conservation-act-1973 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-....
- _delirium 7y agoWhat you linked is a statement Nixon issued after signing a law passed by Congress, not Nixon unilaterally changing DST by executive order.
- paxys 7y agoWell, never mind then. Although Trump did pledge exactly this (permanent DST via executive action) during his campaign, and if anyone is going to try and ram it through regardless of legality or consequences, it's him.
- ianai 7y agoThat would really only work until another president and sympathetic congress issued a counter decree. Granted, I’m sure by then there would be significant pressure to not undo it. That doesn’t always stop them though.
- _delirium 7y agoNo, it would require an amendment to the Uniform Time Act [1]. Under current law, states can opt out of DST (subject to some conditions), but the federal executive branch can't unilaterally force them to opt out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act
- longtimegoogler 7y agoThey didn't give any reason for preferring Standard Time over Daylight Savings Time.
- throw0101a 7y agoPlenty of footnotes if you want to dig into the details / weeds: > Conclusion > In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above. […] > Summary > Discrepancies and misalignments between social (local) clock time, sun clock time, and body clock time can be caused by political decisions: DST is one example. There are multiple health and safety consequences of these misalignments. Our goal is that this article’s facts and reasoning will be used to make clock choices that improve human lives. * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
- longtimegoogler 7y agoInteresting and somewhat counter intuitive to me. I imagine that depends on where one lives in a particular timezone. Personally, I prefer DST. During standard time in California, I have to shift my sleep cycle earlier relative to the clock time as I am unable to sleep once the sun is up which is typically before 7 am.
- maerF0x0 7y ago> Research shows the annual shift disrupts sleep and leads to a higher immediate risk of heart attacks and strokes The point is that the [bi-]annual shifting causes health issues, not which side of the shift we stick to
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- hu3 7y agoBrazil ended daylight-saving time recently: https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-saving-so-should-everyone_2889754.html https://www.theepochtimes.com/brazil-has-nixed-daylight-savi...
- keyle 7y agoIn Australia, in Queensland, we've been trying to get this outdated state to start using daylight savings for years. 95% of the population is in the south east. In summer, the sun is up at 4:30 AM, which means the birds go off nuts at 4 AM. Sunset is at 6:30 PM. On a side note, listen to this little as@#$%^%^*, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5SIs08k8uk and imagine him screaming out your windows at 4 AM. Growing up in Europe, I remember the winters to be dark and miserable, but in the summer we had sun till 9:30 PM. There are many true and false arguments PRO and AGAINST DST. The worst I've heard is "it will upset the cows with feed times" and "it will fade more curtains". The best argument I've heard against DST is that it would put the kids coming home from school outside a sun-hour earlier, meaning there is more UV and it is warmer. That's a valid case against, seeing it's so bloody hot here in summer. Another case, PRO DST study concluded that the lack of DST causes people to drive home in peak hour with the sun in their eyes, causing more accidents. At this point, I think DST is still a good thing. It's good for the economy. We don't go out to have dinner in the dark, for example. But I'm getting too old to care. This article's arguments are very thin in my books.
- throw0101a 7y ago> The best argument I've heard against DST is that it would put the kids coming home from school outside a sun-hour earlier, meaning there is more UV and it is warmer. That's a valid case against, seeing it's so bloody hot here in summer. There are better arguments than that which have passed peer review: * https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00944/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
- dexterdog 7y agoWhy can't we just all go to UTC? Certain places need to be able to adjust business hours during the year and they can do that regardless.
- throw0101a 7y ago> Why can't we just all go to UTC? See discussion on the article "So you want to abolish time zones": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765
- usr1106 7y agoThe same research is quoted again and again... But people do travel in an ever increasing amount over timezones. Often many of them, often more than twice a year. At least here bar opening hours have been significantly deregulated over the last decades. So you can go out and drink until 4am or 5am and obviously people do that. Compared to that the health effects of 1 hour time shift twice a year sound ridiculous to me.
- James_Henry 7y agoThe article points out that travel related jet lag is often different because it doesn't happen over and over and over however when you switch to daylight savings time you may have to be waking up an hour earlier according to your biological clock day after day after day.
- herf 7y agoThere's a lot of talk about acute risks--what happens a day or two after the time change. Most articles you'll read are all about this. The second topic, the main one that circadian scientists talk about, is chronic risks, and I believe they are more important to our health. To follow this logic, you have to believe that people will continue doing whatever it is they do today (e.g., going to bed at midnight), and won't shift their schedule around right away to optimize sleep--i.e. they will not recognize that their body clock is set mainly by sunlight. The campaign to change school start times has been going for 25+ years already, so fast changes here are pretty rare. When the clocks change, people wake up at a different circadian time, and if that time is too early, it is associated with worse health outcomes. Some large-scale epidemiological tools have been used to figure these things out. One compares the difference between sleep patterns on "work" days and "free" days - like how much do you sleep in on a weekend? (Till Roenneberg's "social jetlag"). A second method uses "position in timezone" - comparing people living on the eastern or western edge of a timezone in various ways. Roenneberg's work from the mid-2000s showed that night owls suffer a lot under "wake up before the sun" kinds of schedules (their "social jetlag" is bigger) - it makes them fatter, more irritable, get more diabetes, etc. They don't go to bed any earlier, but they're forced to wake up earlier. Next, when you look at timezone position (this has been done for millions of people), people on the western edge of a timezone (where the sun comes up later but the clock is set at the same time) are quite a bit worse off for cancer rates and obesity - 10-20% more for some kinds of cancers, and a roughly 20% increase in chances of being obese. I'm worried about these chronic health problems, so I've been writing and advocating for standard time: https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500923 https://medium.com/@herf/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b50...
- monort 7y agoWould (standard time - 1) be even better? Does the data exist? I think Chinese should have it.
- herf 7y agoYes China should have some of this, but they have also had time to adapt to a fixed timezone. Most of these curves are U-shaped... I think generally standard time-1 would "hurt" early birds, and DST/double DST would discriminate against night owls. The pattern for early birds is they get an invite for a business dinner at 9PM (staying up late) and then they wake up at 4:30AM anyway, so they don't sleep enough when you make them stay up late.
- mindways 7y agoIn addition to the public-health issues of heart attacks and car accidents, the time-swaps are also a huge PITA for parents of young children. Kids between half a year and three years old have sleep routines that don't shift just because someone says the clocks have changed. Fall back an hour? Congrats, your wake-up time just went from 5:30 AM to 4:30 AM because that's when your kid's still getting up. Spring forward an hour? OK, you just lost an hour from that shining window between when your kid goes to sleep and your own bedtime when you can actually get other stuff done.