When it comes to health, daylight saving time, frankly, sucks. It’s not just that we lose an hour of sleep (which is, in itself, harmful), it’s that every day spent in daylight saving time takes a toll on our body, says Emily Manoogian, a senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who studies the body’s biological clocks.
“The whole time we’re on daylight saving time, we’re misaligning our environment with our bodies,” Manoogian says. “It’s not the one-hour shift that makes everyone feel bad. It’s this chronic disruption that makes us worse versions of ourselves.”
Jet lag is a good way to think about daylight saving time, says Manoogian, who is also a member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego, and public outreach chair at the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. We don’t just lose an hour of sleep; our circadian system is also thrown out of whack. The circadian system refers to the body’s suite of clocks—every cell with DNA has a clock, and each of these clocks feeds back into one another. Our brain acts as a kind of Time Lord that uses light and other sensory cues to coordinate our behavior, such as when we eat and sleep, and that regulates the timing of all the clocks.
Having grown up in Arizona, the first time I changed a clock was fall of my freshman year of college. I was used to having to bear in mind whether we were effectively on Mountain or Pacific time when calling out of state.
Just push standard time ahead by 30 minutes year 'round and let us end this madness.
(B.C. has changed its clocks for the final time and will permanently remain on DST.)
Ok, humor me for a minute because I’ve been pondering something for a while now.
Could it be possible to just automatically adjust clocks by however many seconds it would take per year? Like, 60 minutes divided by 365 days = 9.863 seconds per day. Nobody will notice ~10 seconds a day and I refuse to believe our current technology isn’t smart enough to make something like that work. It just seems like there should be a better solution than the current one that’s implemented…
This doesn’t account for leap years, leap seconds, drift, timezones, which planet you’re on, or velocity of both the clock and its observer. That couldn’t possibly work.
Being more serious, time is far more complicated than that. It’s better to just keep clocks simple.
Thanks for the comment, those are all good points. I knew my idea was pretty over the top, but sometimes the way we currently do things seems pretty ridiculous as well. Lol
Isn’t the better solution just… not to do it at all?
What the actual flying fuck, it’s just 60 minutes and people crumble emotionally.
We have real problems, not this bullshit every 6 months because people get anxious about changing the time on a clock.
Lol k
Maybe, yeah, but people can’t seem to make up their mind about it and agree on it. The automated solution that I presented would be a compromise to keep it, but in an arguably better way.
I can see that, but there’s just way too many normal non-connected clocks to achieve it. Maybe if you can get Big Clock onboard 🤔