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Is this really all fueled by having to change your clocks? The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie

by ouid 5y ago

Is this really all fueled by having to change your clocks? The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.

area51org 5y ago
It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.
- haveyoubeen 5y ago
  Why not go to bed an hour earlier or start work later? Are you a prisoner?
  - chaorace 5y ago
    Why yes, I am! It's dark, there's hardly any room to move around, and I'm constantly surrounded in cerebrospinal fluid.
    - haveyoubeen 5y ago
      Jokes aside, Don't let your society push you around.
thawaya3113 5y ago
Your comment neatly encapsulates the problem. If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm. It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
- ouid 5y ago
  The hour of sunlight is approximately sinusoidal. Changing time is approximating the sinusoid with a square wave. It's not as smooth as it could be, but smoothing it out would cause more accounting problems than it would solve. It is also easier to manage than having schools and businesses change their hours in winter, which is the other way to approach the solution. If you want a smoother transition you are fully in control of that.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Your body's natural schedule operates on a day that's 24.18 hours long. The only reason we don't get hopelessly out of sync is because our internal clock is "reset" by the sun each day. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biological-clock-set-back-an-hour/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biologi...

by ouid 5y ago

area51org 5y ago

It's fueled by the exhaustion caused by monkeying with what time it is. It's not about circadian rhythms. It's about having to wake up an hour early and pretend that you got enough sleep, and for no good reason.

haveyoubeen 5y ago
Why not go to bed an hour earlier or start work later? Are you a prisoner?
- chaorace 5y ago
  Why yes, I am! It's dark, there's hardly any room to move around, and I'm constantly surrounded in cerebrospinal fluid.
  - haveyoubeen 5y ago
    Jokes aside, Don't let your society push you around.

thawaya3113 5y ago

Your comment neatly encapsulates the problem. If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm. It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.

ouid 5y ago
The hour of sunlight is approximately sinusoidal. Changing time is approximating the sinusoid with a square wave. It's not as smooth as it could be, but smoothing it out would cause more accounting problems than it would solve. It is also easier to manage than having schools and businesses change their hours in winter, which is the other way to approach the solution. If you want a smoother transition you are fully in control of that.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Your body's natural schedule operates on a day that's 24.18 hours long. The only reason we don't get hopelessly out of sync is because our internal clock is "reset" by the sun each day. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biological-clock-set-back-an-hour/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biologi...