The Case Against Daylight Savings Time

There is no feeling like the feeling I get the day after Daylight Savings Time goes into effect. Like many Americans, I wake up Sunday morning, confused by why I slept so long. I head downstairs to make coffee and realize the clocks don't match the time on my iPhone. Then it hits me, that sinking, depressing, angry feeling - time to "spring forward." Like losing a good friend, the comfortable, warm sleep pattern that makes winter tolerable is now over. The next few months, as I "adjust" to the new time change, will be uncomfortable. As the days get longer, my bedtime gets later. Like most people, I can't sleep when it's daylight out. In fact for me, daylight is the ultimate stimulant. If the sun's up, I'm up. And as I get to bed later and later, I get to get up an hour earlier, leaving me in a foggy daze, as if "DST" were some kind of illegal drug. And for what?

Daylight savings time was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1794. He got the idea from his time in Europe. In connection with his proposal, Franklin argued that setting the clocks ahead by one hour, thus making the days ridiculously long in the Summer, would cut down on the use of candles. Mr. Franklin made the first conservation argument in favor of DST, but it would not be the last. Beginning in World War I, the U.S. Government, in response to the German military's move, made the first implementation of DST. The intention was to help with wartime production by forcing "an extra hour" of work by "lengthening the day." DST was once again implemented during World War II and referred to as "War Time."

Weather these wartime efforts actually worked has been a point of significant debate. Nevertheless, in 1966, the U.S. Congress made DST the norm across the country. Since then, it has been shortened and lengthened from time to time at the whim of politicians in an effort solve some problem, either real or imagined. Daylight Savings time now runs for 8 months, while "standard" time only runs for 4 months. Go figure.

There is a reason why the four months off of DST is called "standard." Standard is normal. Standard is what one finds when looking for the ordinary. "Standard" is based on the notion that people generally get up about 30 minutes to an hour after sunrise and go to sleep about two hours after sunset, allowing for a full 8 hours of sleep. "Standard" has been repeatedly demonstrated to be normal human behavior in multiple academic studies, but we don't need elaborate studies to prove it. We have tens of thousands of years of history and decades of our own personal experience all of which tells us that we do best when we follow our natural circadian rhythms. Disrupting those rhythms is suicide, maybe not in the short term, but in the long term our health suffers.

Sleep affects everything we do. Humans require between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a day to stay healthy and operate at peak levels. Sleeping less than that has been clinically proven to cause increased depression and increased anxiety, leading to the release of stress hormones like cortisol and insulin, which tend to make us overweight. Poor sleep has a significant impact on our immune systems, compromising our ability to fight illness by as much as a third. Poor sleep increases the risk of almost every major illness from heart disease and diabetes to Alzheimer's disease. Spending 8 months of the year in a sleep deprived state makes our entire nation less healthy, and less healthy people are less productive.

A wise Native American once mused: "Only the white man would cut off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom and claim that he now has a longer blanket." It seems to me he had a point. Daylight Savings Time has been sold to us like so much snake oil. Supporters of DST argue that the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day helps conserve energy. Like Franklin's argument, they say that we use less electricity. That argument has been largely disproven by long term studies, most notably in the states of California and Indiana. In both states, the government found that energy use actually increased during daylight savings time, ostensibly because people are awake longer and use more air conditioning. I have another theory. It is nearly indisputable that the human body requires about two hours of darkness or low light before the neurotransmitters regulating sleep will be released. That's why doctors have been telling us for years to turn off the iPads and the TV an hour or two before bed, especially for children. The light keeps us awake. My guess is that people still use the same amount of electricity during DST because they are still awake, because it is still light outside and, in fact, they won't start getting tired until two hours after sunset. Nothing is saved, and sleep is lost. The snake oil did not work as advertised...

So, as you sip your fifth cup of coffee today, think about whether the 200 year experiment with DST has really benefited us as Americans and whether it fits into the modern world. We are already terribly sleep deprived. We are still the most productive nation in the world, and we don't need any additional catalyst to stay that way.

Finally, I'll leave you with this question: Didn't the inventors of DST mix up the seasons? Why make the already long days of summer longer? If there were any time of year when you would want to lengthen the day, wouldn't it be winter, when it gets dark at 5? Daylight Savings Time was a solution to a problem that never existed. There is no longer any reason to keep using this snake oil, and it should be abolished.