The nation has spoken. The United States of America does not believe that changing the clocks twice a year is in our best interest as a nation.
Science has spoken. There are more heart attacks and car accidents after “jumping forward” and on-the-job injuries in this time frame require more recovery time.
Given these factors, should we put the clocks on daylight saving time and end it as the US Senate proposes?
Not so fast, says David Wagner, Doug McKay Research Scholar and associate professor of management at Lundquist College of Business.
Wagner is co-author of Work and sleep: research perspectives for the workplace and his research has been published in the Journal of the Academy of Management, Journal of Applied Psychologyand the Journal of Sleep Researchamong others, and has appeared in popular media such as the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journaland Market.
His research shows that missing an hour in the spring results not only in lost productivity that Monday, but even affects moral decision-making, with police officers handing out harsher punishments than on other days. Additionally, on-the-job injuries increase that day by 6 percent. And those injuries tend to be serious, translating to a nearly 67 percent increase in lost workdays.
While losing an hour of sleep seems to be the source of many of these impacts, choosing the best time permanently should be a thoughtful process.
Daylight saving time allows people additional daylight hours to exercise outdoors and use the park, and also allows businesses to take advantage of bright daylight after 5:00 p.m., encouraging consumers shopping after work. Night traffic accidents can be reduced with more light.
One of the strongest arguments against permanent daylight saving time is that it causes our body’s biological clocks to fight against the natural signal from the sun. In the winter, many places will have darkness well into the morning, meaning people will wake up earlier than their bodies would naturally. The implication is that people will arrive at work before their peak alertness. Additionally, adolescent children (think middle and high school students) learn and perform better later in the day than younger children and adults. Beyond these practical considerations, fighting our natural rhythms by going to bed too late or getting up too early also has serious health implications, including cardiac events, metabolic problems, and even cancer.
Also, in winter, daylight saving time causes children to walk to school with less light and visibility in the mornings and adults to travel to work in the dark, increasing the likelihood of accidents.
Naturally, human bodies respond better to waking up in the light and sleeping in the dark. Standard time is based on a single prime meridian, which for almost 100 years was located at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and is now a more precise, albeit close, position established by the International Service for Earth Rotation and Reference Systems.
So… how did we get here? Smart people have been looking for a way to maximize daylight for centuries. Some credit Ben Franklin with “inventing” daylight savings time, though that seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what many consider to be a satirical article positing that the French could save money on lamp and candle lighting costs by delaying their clocks to get out of bed earlier. It seems reasonable enough, until he smugly suggests waking up his sleep-loving (ie “lazy”) neighbors with cannon fire. Although other thinkers proposed similar ideas, the concept of changing all the clocks in a geographic area for the common good was not widely adopted until World War I as an austerity measure, with the return of standard time after the war. The cycle repeated itself during World War II. In the US, a 1966 act of Congress established the start and end times for spring and fall daylight savings time. President Ronald Reagan slightly moved the start date forward in 1986, and President George Bush extended it again in 2005. The US territories, as well as the states of Hawaii and Arizona, do not participate in DST.
But if one of the goals of daylight saving time in modern times is to reduce energy consumption, as its advocates often cite, it’s not working. In their 2008 study, researchers Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant found the opposite to be true: Overall energy demand increases by about 1 percent during daylight saving time.
There are pros and cons to both standard time and daylight saving time, it’s the back-and-forth switching that’s literally killing us, Wagner said.
“In the end, getting a healthy amount and quality of sleep reduces most concerns,” Wagner said. “However, achieving that dream may require adjusting social institutions, such as high school start times and the workplace. Good sleep hygiene tends to improve work, productivity and physical well-being, which is why we humans should prioritize consistent sleep patterns rather than focusing on clock time.”
In the continental United States, is it realistic to expect that we will change school and work start times, the scheduling of social and sporting events and other activities, or would it be better to switch to standard time as a way of aligning our biological clocks? with the sun?
“Given that Congress is working hard to make this change, we would do well to consider ending the shift, but establishing standard time,” Wagner said. “As much as I love those summer afternoon bike rides, the overall health and safety implications of permanent daylight saving time are too important to ignore.”
—AnneMarie Knepper-Sjoblom ’05, Lundquist College Communications
