Daylight Saving Time is Bad for You and Here’s Why
People are quite divided on their love (or loathe) of Daylight-Saving Time. The idea of “Springing Forward” to enjoy more hours of seeing the sun might sound ideal but with it brings the dreaded realization that we are losing sleep and having to get up an hour earlier than we are used to. Time waits for no one and the Monday following DST is here, just in time to toll our circadian rhythms to the tune of “out of whack”.
Just this simple task of moving the hour hand can trigger underlying health issues, according to Time and Date.
A lack of sleep is a minor annoyance for most people, but for some it can be detrimental to their health.
A Swedish study found that the risk of having a heart attack increases in the first 3 weekdays after switching to DST in the spring.
Tiredness induced by the clock change is thought to be the main cause for the increase in traffic accidents on the Monday following the start of DST.
On Mondays after the start of DST there were more workplace injuries, and the injuries were of greater severity compared with other Mondays.
The start of DST has also been linked to miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients.
The findings don’t stop there. The New Daily has their own bad news to share about other examples of why Daylight-Saving Time is bad.
A 2016 study from the University of Turku, Finland, found that the overall rate of ischemic stroke was eight percent higher during the first two days after a daylight saving time transition. There was no difference after two days.
Another 2016 study titled Sleepy Punishers Are Harsh Punishers: Daylight Saving Time and Legal Sentences found that judges in the United States tended to give defendants longer sentences the day after switching to daylight saving time compared with other days of the year.
Americans cannot escape the movement of time, unless your living in most of Arizona, a US territory or Hawaii, where they don’t tolerate this time hop that was implemented in the United States in 1918 to make better use of natural daylight in their local time zone.
Being tired is tough and can decrease productivity, concentration, and general well-being. Try to get some rest the days leading up to the change and allow yourself time to process in the days that follow.
One more thing that likely is impacting my mood along with the time change— it’s Daylight Saving Time with no “s”. No one is out there “savings daylight” on behalf of letting the sunshine in. Can we just cancel this already?
