![]() “Believe it or not, having light in the morning actually not only makes you feel more alert but helps you go to bed at the right time at night,” Beth Malow, director of the sleep division of Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine, told Kaiser Health News last year. or at 5:30 p.m., and then you’ll know where you really fall on this issue.” The case against Daylight Time “Ask yourself if you are more likely to be outside in the world at 7:30 a.m. Getting rid of Standard Time “would mean you would sometimes wake up with it slightly darker outside, but you’d get so much more sunlight and ‘daytime’ after 5 p.m.,” Ben Yakas wrote for Gothamist in 2019. The spring switch, by contrast, was found to have no similar effect. According to a 2017 study, the transition from Daylight Time to Standard Time is associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that takes 10 weeks to dissipate. Proponents of Daylight Time also argue that having more daylight in the evenings is simply more useful - and less depressing. The actual effect may be small, but still significant: A report from the JP Morgan Chase Institute found that consumers spend 0.9 percent more at the onset of Daylight Time and 3.5 percent less in the month after the clocks fall back. In 1986, lobbyists for the golf industry estimated that an extra month of Daylight Time would be worth $200 million to $400 million. When there’s more light in the evening, the theory goes, consumers will use it to leave their homes and spend their money. “Standard Time has precisely the opposite impact, by moving sunlight into the morning.”īusinesses have historically been some of the most vocal champions of Daylight Time. ![]() brings an extra hour of sunlight into the evening to mitigate those risks,” he writes. One reason is that darkness in the evening is associated with both larger numbers of fatal car accidents and higher levels of crime than darkness in the morning. ![]() Steve Calandrillo, a law professor at the University of Washington who has conducted economic research on the topic, thinks it’s the right move. If Americans already spend most of the year on Daylight Time, should we just get rid of Standard Time altogether, as so many legislators have proposed? The case for making Daylight Time permanent “Chronic misalignment between the internal clock and occupational, family and social activities can be very disruptive.” “Light is the most powerful regulator of our internal clock, also known as our circadian rhythm, and some people may not even adjust to the time change after several months,” says Anita Shelgikar, an associate professor of sleep medicine and neurology at the University of Michigan Health System. The twice-yearly switch no longer saves much energy, but it does take a serious toll on people’s health. Today, Standard Time is in effect now for only about four months, between November and March. While the division between the two time systems was equal at first, Daylight Time has over the decades come to rule a bigger and bigger share of the year. (Arizona and Hawaii remain holdout states.) The change was initially unpopular, however, and wouldn’t become permanent until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which established Daylight Time throughout most of the country. In March of 1918, Congress enacted the Standard Time Act, which both defined the country’s time zones and temporarily instituted the clock change. Soon, England and much of the rest of Europe followed suit, as did the United States. “While the British were talking about it year after year, the Germans decided to do it more or less by fiat,” David Prerau, author of “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time,” explained to National Geographic in 2019. In 1916, the German government embraced moving the clocks forward as a means of saving energy. It wasn’t until World War I, though, that the idea gained serious political momentum. The origins of Daylight Time are often traced back to Benjamin Franklin, who in a 1784 satirical essay suggested that the city of Paris could save millions of pounds of candle wax every year if Parisians woke up earlier in the morning and went to bed earlier at night. Why do we change our clocks in the first place?
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