I'm wondering why there is so much more debate on what time the clock says compared to what time school and work and other activities should start and end...
This is one of the few instances in which studies on Americans are less relevant to my community (despite being in the USA). It's pretty hard to believe that 4 pm sunsets in winter are the best for our collective health, but it's what we deal with now (and we'll be stuck with if standard time becomes permanent). I respect that people further south have issues due to shifts in daylight, but it all seems so minor compared to the shifts we see up north. It is interesting to note that British Columbia is on permanent DST, and they experience even more extreme shifts in sunlight.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful analysis. You have changed my mind! I’ve always favored permanent DST because I’m a therapist who works afternoon and evening hours and I revel in the extra daylight at night. But, since it’s not all about me, permanent standard time makes absolute sense, given that the majority of the nation likely wakes up before I do.
I get up at 3am. It will always be dark at 3am. Nothing about this time change is going to affect my sleep. These arguments that claim that this effect is universal is often overblown. Sleep patterns all across the globe are disrupted by a multitude of things from omnipresent electric lights, the crowding of humanity into cities and the presence of nonstop activity 24/7, to the unique exposure to different chemical patterns within post-industrial society. The fervor with which people whine about the time change being some devastating blow to their sleep is an over-reaction to soothe the psyche of someone who has no control over all the things that affect their sleep, but this one thing asks them to physically engage with a ritualistic clock change, this one piece of a large puzzle where they are asked to participate, and this allows them to fetishize this one thing as a stand-in where they think they can feel like they have control, that they can influence the levers that have affected humanity's sleep. They don't have control. Time change to standard or DST permanently will be a drop in the bucket to all the other influences on our sleep patterns, and all of those will continue. Yet, people will claim things will be worse anyway, because they need to feel like they have control.
I want the time change to stop. I don't care if it's STD or DST made permanent, but I do know that this has taken forever to get through congress, so whichever one makes it, that's the one I want, and I hope this nonsense whining about sleep disruption doesn't stop it.
This is such an interesting idea, and not necessarily impossible. The Canadian Maritime provinces have been 90 minutes ahead of Eastern time for about 150 years, so a shift of 30 minutes is not as weird as it sounds!
I imagine that a shift to permanent DST would be especially bad for teenagers, whose natural sleep and wake up times are shifted about 2 hours than those of adults and young children.
I swear if they make standard time permanent I will have to move to Canada. Here in Maine, we are in the wrong time zone during the winter, a fact that becomes most obvious when you cross from Calais to St. Stephen NB--you are driving north, but you change to Atlantic Time, where Maine rightly belongs. We're going to have 9 hours of daylight in winter either way, but I would much prefer those hours to be 8-5 than 7-4, as they are now--the darkness clamping down at 4pm drives us to drink and depression. In the summer, I'm perfectly happy with my 5am-9pm daylight, but the sun rising at 4 would be a monumental pain unless they start opening the pools at 5.
I’m with ya! I think that if a person can’t handle a one-hour change twice a year, they better never travel across other time zones.
Unless we want to put the entire country on the same time, that is. Then we’d all be safe! One pm in New York would be one pm in LA. All year round. It makes about as much sense as anything else…
It's not about sunrise but SUNSET! The sunrise time is not important to me as for my entire adult life I've been to work (at 7am) before the winter sun comes up anyways. Adopting either time option doesn't change that. With the current time changing schedule us Wisconsinites don't see the sun during the winter months except at lunch and weekends. The sun comes up after I'm at work and has just set before I leave. If we adopt the late sunset at least I can have some time at home with the sun above the horizon.
We actually have a much longer-running natural experiment than the 1974 permanent DST in the US, as I found out when I visited England and western Spain this past April and May. England uses UTC+0, whereas Spain uses UTC+1, an hour earlier than England, even though it is west of England. Portugal, due south of western Spain, is, like England, UTC+0. Spain is effectively always on DST relative to England and Portugal. In going from England to Spain, I found that it got light in the morning and dark in the evening much later than it did in England. I also found that restaurants and businesses in Spain opened later in the morning and closed later in the evening than in England or the US. As a self-described morning person, I had a choice between going with the clock schedule or going with the circadian light (and cultural) schedule. I chose the circadian schedule and found myself happily getting out of bed and going to bed considerably later by the clock than I did in the US. Could a comparison of Spain to Portugal and England be probative of the choice between permanent standard versus daylight savings time? If the US went to permanent daylight savings time, would our cultural daily rhythms eventually look more like Spain’s?
The last time this came up, I emailed my representatives to say that I preferred permanent standard time, but that either that OR permanent DST would be better than switching twice a year.
Permanent DST is a popular idea in Massachusetts, and Sen. Markey is one of the people pushing for it. But I lived in Seattle for three years, which is near the western edge of the time zone, and permanent DST would put the west coast significantly out of alignment with solar time.
A useful comparison would be Arizona — which observes Standard Time year-round across most of the state — against other states at a similar latitude that follow Daylight Saving Time. Personally, I prefer Daylight Saving Time, but if the evidence shows Standard Time is better for most people, I'd fully support adopting it.
More sunlight in the evening. Kids go straight to school in the morning. After school they go to after school events, parks, friends, malls(?). It’s much better to have sunshine then. Also they’re more likely to participate in outdoor activities twelve months a year.
The dates to shift between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time have been moved several times. Would it be better to change the shift dates over a course of years than to simply stop altogether?
Also, I understand the concerns about less light in the morning - but I live in Denver, and the mountains mean that there is very little light in the evening, to the point that students walking to school in the dark is less of an issue than students walking home in the dark. There is also a lot more environmental light today than there was in the 1970s - I remember the shift then, and the sparsity of street lights at the time. That issue has been remediated in many places - and especially in places where students walk to and from school.
Recently moved to small west facing apt . and really feeling lack of daylight wake-up! Some time could you give suggestions for artificial light sources? As in full spectrum? Set on t Omer light maybe? Thank you. Every sending from you and your team is helpful for me, this one was astonishingly timely, so to speak.
I'm wondering why there is so much more debate on what time the clock says compared to what time school and work and other activities should start and end...
This is one of the few instances in which studies on Americans are less relevant to my community (despite being in the USA). It's pretty hard to believe that 4 pm sunsets in winter are the best for our collective health, but it's what we deal with now (and we'll be stuck with if standard time becomes permanent). I respect that people further south have issues due to shifts in daylight, but it all seems so minor compared to the shifts we see up north. It is interesting to note that British Columbia is on permanent DST, and they experience even more extreme shifts in sunlight.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful analysis. You have changed my mind! I’ve always favored permanent DST because I’m a therapist who works afternoon and evening hours and I revel in the extra daylight at night. But, since it’s not all about me, permanent standard time makes absolute sense, given that the majority of the nation likely wakes up before I do.
I get up at 3am. It will always be dark at 3am. Nothing about this time change is going to affect my sleep. These arguments that claim that this effect is universal is often overblown. Sleep patterns all across the globe are disrupted by a multitude of things from omnipresent electric lights, the crowding of humanity into cities and the presence of nonstop activity 24/7, to the unique exposure to different chemical patterns within post-industrial society. The fervor with which people whine about the time change being some devastating blow to their sleep is an over-reaction to soothe the psyche of someone who has no control over all the things that affect their sleep, but this one thing asks them to physically engage with a ritualistic clock change, this one piece of a large puzzle where they are asked to participate, and this allows them to fetishize this one thing as a stand-in where they think they can feel like they have control, that they can influence the levers that have affected humanity's sleep. They don't have control. Time change to standard or DST permanently will be a drop in the bucket to all the other influences on our sleep patterns, and all of those will continue. Yet, people will claim things will be worse anyway, because they need to feel like they have control.
I want the time change to stop. I don't care if it's STD or DST made permanent, but I do know that this has taken forever to get through congress, so whichever one makes it, that's the one I want, and I hope this nonsense whining about sleep disruption doesn't stop it.
In this hyper-polarized world, a compromise of permanently setting the time midway between DST and Standard Time would be ideal but impossible.
This is such an interesting idea, and not necessarily impossible. The Canadian Maritime provinces have been 90 minutes ahead of Eastern time for about 150 years, so a shift of 30 minutes is not as weird as it sounds!
Funny we can’t look to the past for understanding, but rather seem ready to repeat it.
I imagine that a shift to permanent DST would be especially bad for teenagers, whose natural sleep and wake up times are shifted about 2 hours than those of adults and young children.
I swear if they make standard time permanent I will have to move to Canada. Here in Maine, we are in the wrong time zone during the winter, a fact that becomes most obvious when you cross from Calais to St. Stephen NB--you are driving north, but you change to Atlantic Time, where Maine rightly belongs. We're going to have 9 hours of daylight in winter either way, but I would much prefer those hours to be 8-5 than 7-4, as they are now--the darkness clamping down at 4pm drives us to drink and depression. In the summer, I'm perfectly happy with my 5am-9pm daylight, but the sun rising at 4 would be a monumental pain unless they start opening the pools at 5.
Sounds like the solution is to move Maine to Atlantic time.
(I'm originally from Orono.)
Absolutely. But imagine the chaos if we were in a different time zone from Boston and New York.
Why chaos? A period of adjustment, sure.
There are a lot of people in time zones that don’t include Boston and NYC.
I don’t like changing the clocks twice a year but (unpopular opinion) I prefer it over having to choose between which way to keep them permanently.
I’m with ya! I think that if a person can’t handle a one-hour change twice a year, they better never travel across other time zones.
Unless we want to put the entire country on the same time, that is. Then we’d all be safe! One pm in New York would be one pm in LA. All year round. It makes about as much sense as anything else…
It's not about sunrise but SUNSET! The sunrise time is not important to me as for my entire adult life I've been to work (at 7am) before the winter sun comes up anyways. Adopting either time option doesn't change that. With the current time changing schedule us Wisconsinites don't see the sun during the winter months except at lunch and weekends. The sun comes up after I'm at work and has just set before I leave. If we adopt the late sunset at least I can have some time at home with the sun above the horizon.
We actually have a much longer-running natural experiment than the 1974 permanent DST in the US, as I found out when I visited England and western Spain this past April and May. England uses UTC+0, whereas Spain uses UTC+1, an hour earlier than England, even though it is west of England. Portugal, due south of western Spain, is, like England, UTC+0. Spain is effectively always on DST relative to England and Portugal. In going from England to Spain, I found that it got light in the morning and dark in the evening much later than it did in England. I also found that restaurants and businesses in Spain opened later in the morning and closed later in the evening than in England or the US. As a self-described morning person, I had a choice between going with the clock schedule or going with the circadian light (and cultural) schedule. I chose the circadian schedule and found myself happily getting out of bed and going to bed considerably later by the clock than I did in the US. Could a comparison of Spain to Portugal and England be probative of the choice between permanent standard versus daylight savings time? If the US went to permanent daylight savings time, would our cultural daily rhythms eventually look more like Spain’s?
The last time this came up, I emailed my representatives to say that I preferred permanent standard time, but that either that OR permanent DST would be better than switching twice a year.
Permanent DST is a popular idea in Massachusetts, and Sen. Markey is one of the people pushing for it. But I lived in Seattle for three years, which is near the western edge of the time zone, and permanent DST would put the west coast significantly out of alignment with solar time.
I guess it’s time to call my senators again.
A useful comparison would be Arizona — which observes Standard Time year-round across most of the state — against other states at a similar latitude that follow Daylight Saving Time. Personally, I prefer Daylight Saving Time, but if the evidence shows Standard Time is better for most people, I'd fully support adopting it.
More sunlight in the evening. Kids go straight to school in the morning. After school they go to after school events, parks, friends, malls(?). It’s much better to have sunshine then. Also they’re more likely to participate in outdoor activities twelve months a year.
The dates to shift between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time have been moved several times. Would it be better to change the shift dates over a course of years than to simply stop altogether?
Also, I understand the concerns about less light in the morning - but I live in Denver, and the mountains mean that there is very little light in the evening, to the point that students walking to school in the dark is less of an issue than students walking home in the dark. There is also a lot more environmental light today than there was in the 1970s - I remember the shift then, and the sparsity of street lights at the time. That issue has been remediated in many places - and especially in places where students walk to and from school.
Recently moved to small west facing apt . and really feeling lack of daylight wake-up! Some time could you give suggestions for artificial light sources? As in full spectrum? Set on t Omer light maybe? Thank you. Every sending from you and your team is helpful for me, this one was astonishingly timely, so to speak.