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Is Daylight Saving Time Bad For You?
Hugh Pickens writes "According to experts on circadian rhythms, the hour shift in sleep schedule from Daylight Saving Time can have serious effects on some people's health, particularly in people with certain pre-existing health problems. One study found that men were more likely to commit suicide during the first few weeks of Daylight Saving Time (DST) than at any other time during the year, and another study showed that the number of serious heart attacks jumps 6% to 10% on the first three workdays after DST begins. Dr. Xiaoyong Yang, an assistant professor of comparative medicine and cellular and molecular physiology at Yale University, theorizes that shifts in biologic rhythms could trigger harmful inflammatory or metabolic changes at the cellular level, to which these individuals may be more susceptible."
I don't care I enjoy the later sunsets.
It sounds like the heart attacks (at least) would have happened anyway at a later point, if someone is that vulnerable to small changes.
As someone who suffers from SAD, depression, etc. I can attest to the fact that a strict sleep schedule is incredibly important to keeping me healthy and functional. DST rudely smashes all my carefully laid schedules and plans.
It may not seem like much, but even shifting things by a single hour and put me (and people like me) a very difficult spot. Light boxes and sunrise simulator alarm clocks help, but what helps the most is strict consistency in sleep/wake times. This is especially harmful to people with bipolar disorder because it can trigger a manic or depressive episode.
DST sucks!
How does this compare to people who travel one time zone over, let alone multiple time zones? Aren't these people (millions) in worse shape?
This is the weak getting picked off. If you can't handle an hour change twice a year, you probably shouldn't be getting up (to work) anyways.
I saw an editorial cartoon perhaps 30 years ago. In the cartoon, Richard Nixon is depicted sitting in a rocking chair saying "I need to make this blanket longer, so that we can stay warm in the winter. So I'll cut one foot of the blanket off at one end, and sew it onto the other end." That's everything you need to know about Daylight Savings Time.
In other news, I believe that waking up to an alarm clock is hazardous to my health.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
FTA:
In other words, people who are already vulnerable to certain health problems may experience more severe effects of their body-clock disruption.
In other words, people who are already in trouble feel compound effects with other changes in their lives.
Can an hour or two really have such a severe effect? If that was the case, shouldn't there be a massive effect when travelling and crossing time zones? A quick PubMed search didn't throw up any studies with jetlag and suicide or heart attack.
To solve the problem is VERY simple, but the politicians don't like it. When you move to summer time, move the clocks 1/2 hour forward instead of 1 hour... and then LEAVE them there. No more going forwards and backwards wasting time changing countless clocks and gadgets, and no more bickering about moving the timezone multiple hours forward like the UK had recently just to please some European fascists.
Recent campaign for UK to be on Berlin Time
Portugal wants to move back to GMT
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Concerning TFA: I guess it pushes only those people over the edge that were close to it anyway.
Apart from that: I hate DST.
If they dont want to waste daylight in summer, people should fix their timetables instead of fiddling with everybody's clocks.
The problem with DST is the free lunch mentality that goes with it. It was the first response of Congress to the "energy crisis" of the early 70's, and has remained the solution of choice for similar problems ever since. People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight", and expect other little bonuses to be handed to them just as painlessly. Sorry for the rant, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine.
Goddamn right, Daylight Savings Time is bad for me.
It fucks with my sleep cycle -- messes it up for a week or more -- every six months, like fucking clockwork.
Repeal it, stop it, get rid of it forever.
-kgj
No more moving forward and back. Make dst the standard time. And with a single timezone you would always know when it was a decent time to call someone or start drinking alcohol. And you would always know when you could expect a business to be open no matter where in the world you are.
theorizes that shifts in biologic rhythms could trigger harmful inflammatory or metabolic changes at the cellular level, to which these individuals may be more susceptible."
...OR "Shit shit shit shit I'm late for work I'm gonna be fired again!" gets to you ...
Everytime I read one of these "studies" that "shows" stuff, I can't help but think that the researcher is a press whore or is just trying to get more funding by throwing out a ridiculously convoluted "theory" to explain a simple observation. After all, the "people get stressed out when they're late for work" hypothesis doesn't get you as many grants.
One more hour of having your wife in bed with you, that would but a strain on my heart.
I'm just curious....What year do you think it is?
And, what thread do you think you're replying to?
Just asking.
Turing the clock one hour ahead is bound to screw people up. So why not just turn the clock back 23 hours? The time will be the same, and we all can take that extra "Daylight Savings Day" as an opportunity to lounge around, doing nothing productive.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
so that's good. they can still be defeated. the lights are coming up all over now. darkness, & it's 'shadowy' minions, will be leaving. it would be better if we helped them do LESS damage, as we'll be tasked wit cleaning up the mess. looks daunting so far? see you there, at one of the million babys+ play-dates, georgia done editing(s) etc.... be there or be scared (left in the dark?).
"People are out of work!" "People are starving!" "We're at WAR!" "The economy sucks!" "Corruption via lobbyists!" "Corruption via Koch brothers" "Tea-party!" "R(o|an)d Paul!" ....all true; and too distracting to worry about a tiny little really annoying slightly costly thing like daylight saving time shifting. -sigh-
Next up: shifting to the metric system.
Why don't they average it out to half an hour and just leave it there? Instead of swapping an hour twice a year, swap half an hour one time and don't bother doing it again.
I think the best part of DST is the opportunity to have this semi-annual anti-DST rant-fest. It's better than sunlight!
I am not a crackpot.
Having an extra hour of daylight in the evening is an even better idea in the winter.
If the government gets rid of DST for the health benefits of a few then they should be required to make new laws for other causes of stress too: How about doing federal taxes, job interviews, coming home to the wife after a sneak trip to a strip club, traffic jams, law suits, the bogyman, XMAS shopping, public speaking, jock itch, earthquakes, tornadoes, ice storms and the list could go on forever. More so for some and less for others. Maybe our government should not try to protect us from all stresses in life?
When DST is active, they "gain" an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. An hour that is likely used in household stuff as people come home from work (read: lights are probably on, anyway).
Why can't we just have it at 1/2 hour and leave it at that?
As someone that has to deal with DST and timezones in the IT world I say we go with straight GMT and get rid of all of the rest. Then let local areas adjust accordingly. So in central time zone areas we go to work @ 14:00 GMT and get off at @ 23:00...
Zoid.com
...and it's been working out fine thus far.
Back during the last time change (autumn of 2010), I decided to not change my alarm clock's time. My computer and laptop would auto-adjust, and I'd still have to change the times on my DSLR camera, e-reader, and Nintendo DS. But the alarm clock time remains the same. When the alarm clock shows "9:30 PM", I go to bed (even though it's actually 8:30 PM). When the alarm clock shows "4:00 AM" (even though it's actually 3:00 AM), it sounds and I wake up.
The effect is that my day shifts by an hour twice yearly, but I do not. It was strange for the first week or two, having everything around me shifted by an hour (giving me an extra hour in the dark morning, and an hour less after work), but that's much better than the two weeks it would have taken me to even begin to adjust to an altered sleeping schedule.
Soon I'll find if shifting my day back (moving an hour from my morning to my afternoon) will feel as strange as it did in the autumn. One thing I do know for sure, I won't lose an hour of sleep in the transition.
It's bad for me. Twice a year it causes me severe depression as I'm reminded that I'm living in a country where the people that pass the laws think they can "gain" an hour of daylight by changing the clocks. For fucks sake, just wake up sooner and leave the clocks alone.
In other news, I'm kind of tired of time zones as well. I should disagree with some one on the phone about what time it is. it's the same time every where. What difference does it make if the sun rises at 06:00 or 18:00?
We have daylight savings to *save daylight*. Because in winter-time, we have less sun.
The human mind is closely connected to the sun. Less sun means less happines. Your health might also be connected to this. E.g. you move less when there is less sun, and you get less excercise.
I also have to point that there seem to be no study that proves that removing DST means less suicides or heart attacks.
Be that as it may, not having daylight savings time makes people spend more time in the dark, which may also cause depression.
My name is BMO and I live in Rhode Island. We here in the Northeast US are far enough east that during the winter, we go to work in the dark and we come home in the dark. Unless you have windows in your office or stock room or machine shop, or whatever, you never see the sun except on weekends. It's like being divorced and having partial custody - of sunlight.
The Eastern time zone is so wide that it stretches all the way to the Eastern border of Illinois. This is just nuts. When DST finally shows up in March, suddenly the sun sets at a reasonable hour.
New England and NY should secede from the Union and join the Maritime Provinces simply to get a sane time zone.
I'm sorry for ranting, but I'm tired of my Seasonal Affective Disorder and I can't wait for DST to get here. See? My SAD is showing!
--
BMO
DST starts roughly 80 days after the solstice and ends roughly 50 before the soltice. Changing clocks based onthe season rather than the actual amount of daylight or the time of sunrise is wasteful.
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A 1-hour shift is certainly painful when you wake up on the Monday after DST starts. But how about 4x15 or 2x30 minutes ? Where I live, DSTstarts on March 27th this year. so I think I'll try adjusting to it in 20-minute increments (or decrements, rather) on Monday 14th, Monday 21th and Monday 28th. I'm not gonna change my office hours, but I guess I'll use the extra time in the morning to do other stuff, like practicing my piano for a bit.
As long as the law doesn't change, it seems to me like a sensible thing we can do to fend off the jet lag. Takes just a bit of preparation and discipline (no cheating with the snooze button ! ;) )
Since there are only around 300 million people in the USofA ... and none of them can drive more than 1 car at a time ...
All we'd need to do to completely eliminate the carbon footprint of our cars is to ...
Replace 300 bulbs.
Or 100 people replace 3 bulbs each.
I think your time scales are out of sync.
the time to waste (nitpicking) is gone. that's why. there's plenty of evidence that history is 'creeping' up on us, & the future may be backing up to fetch us up to date? no black hole for us? see you there. can't avoid it.
wit=with done=stone. ok? thanks
Letter to Congressional representatives:
Please get rid of Daylight Savings Time. It is a farce. It does not really help save energy or stimulate the economy. Instead it causes an increase in accidents, suicides, heart attacks and other health problems in addition to the simple inconvenience of the change.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/12/is-daylight-saving-time-bad-for-your-health/
"According to experts on circadian rhythms, the hour shift in sleep schedule from Daylight Saving Time can have serious effects on some people's health, particularly in people with certain pre-existing health problems. One study found that men were more likely to commit suicide during the first few weeks of Daylight Saving Time (DST) than at any other time during the year, and another study showed that the number of serious heart attacks jumps 6% to 10% on the first three workdays after DST begins. Dr. Xiaoyong Yang, an assistant professor of comparative medicine and cellular and molecular physiology at Yale University, theorizes that shifts in biologic rhythms could trigger harmful inflammatory or metabolic changes at the cellular level, to which these individuals may be more susceptible."
Phew... I'm glad you told them. They'll be sure to read through Slashdot looking for comments like yours to base their policies on.
For those areas affected, for the next DST, just go 30 minutes in the appropriate direction and then STOP CHANGING THE CLOCKS FOREVER AFTER.
Tada, Simple cure and one final gig for the Y2K / DST programmers.
Having DST in winter is useless because of that later rise of the sun, around my place it'd mean the sun would only rise around 10 o'clock.
When I hear about the health issues of some it makes me wonder how they cope with a night out in town...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
hahahahahahaha
Yeah, it's a PITA to develop applications around it too. I wonder how many billions of dollars are wasted working around this clunky idea.
has already decided to end daylight-saving time. :) Heck, Arizona lived without DST without problems...
Because "power savings" from this back-and-forth are 0.2%. And hassles from switch time are simply not worth it
Hyperom.com
Changing the clock is idiotic. If anything, working times should be shifted, not "time" itself.
For the last years, since I don't watch broadcasted TV anymore, I only became aware of the DST day because my computers showed a different time than the clock in my microwave.
DST is also known to significantly boost traffic accidents after the switch, as people are tired and make more mistakes while driving.
It's time to abandon this archaic switch.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The question I have is how much does DST have to do with it and how much is simply the time of year? It is possible that people are simply trying to stay awake longer than the available light. I have read elsewhere that being up after dark is not good for you, though like every other study I have to ask myself how much is this based in the factor being studied and how much is this simply a life-style factor?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
it's terrible, I have to live 24 hours in 23 hours and slowly I get my 24 hours back.
cb
Can we have an alternative holiday like Kwanza?
Blame Benjamin Franklin!
It was actually he who suggested it!
http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html
It is very witty!
What with all that darkness you guys deal with, I can't figure out why Scandinavian women evolved into such exquisite creatures. What does it matter, in the dark?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Actually, I think that if the switch to Standard Time occurred at 2am on a Monday, and then the switch to DST occurred at 4pm on a Friday, everyone would be happy.
It basically gives you an hour longer to sleep in on a Monday in the fall, and lets you off work an hour early on a Friday in the spring, giving you the weekend to start re-adjusting. Everyone gets what they want with the least amount of stress.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
Here in Canada, most of us are far enough north that our summers are bright, DST or not. Here in Vancouver at "only" 49 degrees north, the latest sunset (if we stayed on standard time) is about 2025 PST, with twilight until nearly 2200 PST in June and July. Further north it's brighter, later. I've been in Yukon (63 degrees north) in May when it was like a bright overcast day at 0100. How much more do people want?
By the same token, our winters are dark, no matter what we do. The earliest sunset in Vancouver is about 1600 PST, and the latest sunrise is about 0800 PST.
I think messing with the clocks is pointless. There may be a sweet spot, say, around 40 degrees north, but Canada is well north of that.
...laura
daylight shifting time, saving time vs savings time, hilarious
Wasting Daylight
if you can find the full movie, its hilarious
Leave the god damn clock the fuck alone already! Geeze!
Not for attorneys who like to play golf after work. It still puts farmers and farm children to work and school in the
dark; but it did kill a lot of unnecessary sex in cars as DST ended the "drive- in" theatre movie business and, if
still in existence today, would probably be just another spot for Home Land Security to use body scanners.
Did it save electricity, which was its claimed purpose? Only your congressman's hair dresser knows.for sure.
.
The acronym 'DST' in Portuguese stands for 'sexual transmitted disease'
We could go to 10 minute time zones! Or just have everyone set their clock to GMT and just have some people getting up and going to work at 2am...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, you're SADD -- Seasonal Affective Depressive Disorder
I hate standard time. I like later daylight hours! :P
It seems like more people like standard time in my old poll: http://aqfl.net/node/5466 ... :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Daylight Savings Time is just getting your ass out of bed earlier while pretending you're not. If you like to have light in the afternoon after you get out of work, go to work earlier and leave earlier. You're probably a techie like most of us, so you can probably work flexible hours like most of us. It's different if you're a factory assembly line worker and everybody has to be there at once for the line to roll, or a schoolteacher who's got to be there when class starts. (It's also different if you're a farmer and your cows are going to get up at dawn whatever time the clock says, but since most small farmers tend to also have town jobs, having dawn be later is a real pain.)
So stop messing with everybody else's clocks and get your ass out of bed earlier if that's what you want to do. Real morning people do it anyway (as do people with little kids.) Non-morning people don't want to get up anyway, and often don't. It's only you half-assed morning people who insist on adjusting the clocks to pretend you're not getting up as early as you are.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We need to end the time change. We should have daylight saving time observance be year round, then those states that don't want to observe it can opt out like Arizona and Hawaii.
Join our cause on Facebook:http://www.causes.com/causes/465264-stop-the-daylight-savings-time-time-change-support-modern-standard-daylight-time
Well, DST might causes depression and stress to some particularly sensitive individuals, but what about the 400% increase in fatal traffic accidents involving pedestrians when coming out from DST?
Someone might want to explain that it isn't time that changes... just the hands on a watch (or clock). The "circadian" stuff stays exactly the same.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
An early estimate of the 8.9 magnitude quake's effect on the planet shows it sped up rotation by about 1 microsecond.
So all we need is enough huge earthquakes to change the day by an hour -- ergo, no more need for daylight saving time! Okay, there might be a few undesirable side-effects...
I guess you didn't get it. Isn't the question "Is Daylight Saving Time Bad For You" ?
How about going further and ask yourself "what's the point of DST" ?
What grand socialist/communist/fascist design is it to herd a nation of people to wake up earlier when the "market" of businesses itself can just as easily define an earlier starting time for business? They've easily defined varying closing times depending on the needs of their business already.
There's no meaningful, proven savings, so why bother messing with everybody's clock? Everybody means every nation gets dragged in because it's costly to have mismatched starting times between countries.
It's a useless anachronism that gets worse when Presidents like Bush come along and push tweaks to it that again don't help or fix anything except make it more "fun" to have more darkness in the winter. We have GMT -- we should just stick to that.
sadly i run out of mod points, other wise u`d get +1 troll
warning pointless sig
Nevermind the fact that your logs would magically have overlapping entries for a 23-hour period.
Some people are morning people. Such people struggle to stay awake at night and spontaneously wake up in the morning.
Some people are night owls. Such people struggle to get up in the morning and aren't sleepy in the evenings (even with only 5 hours sleep the night before).
And you want to make it even more difficult?!? Why? If you want to get up earlier, then do so, but don't force us night owls to struggle even more than we already do.
At least morning people only need to keep their engines running in the evenings (hard enough), whereas night people must actually get them started in the mornings (even harder). And if a morning person really wants to, he/she can actually go to bed earlier, much earlier, and many do. Night people don't have the option of getting up any later.
And it's not just a matter of "going to bed earlier". Do you think I haven't tried that? What about all the years I went to school and work? Do you think I didn't try? (Uni doesn't count. Fewer contact hours. ;) I've solved it for the time being by becoming a freelancer.
For some people, going to bed earlier simply doesn't seem to work. I don't know why. And I would not be surprised if this is the cause of many health issues, but because it's the norm, these issues would fall below the radar.
Well, the twice-yearly whining about it sometimes raises my blood pressure, if that's what you mean.
Obviously we have gotten far too soft. Now we are listening to DOCTORS who are telling us we might die because of a slight shift in sleep hours.Humans are not so F***ing delicate. If we are, we should be darwined out. Looks like another excuse for 1) a lawsuit, or 2) getting some more mind-numbing meds. And paying a doctor, a pharmacist, and putting more money in the insurance company pocket. After all, they are stockholders in the doctor office, the med manufacturer, and the major pharmacies.
Yes. It irritates me twice a year, raising my blood pressure.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Seriously. If we really wanted to "save daylight" we'd be IN DST during the winter, NOT during the summer WHEN WE HAVE THE MOST DAYLIGHT!!! Besides, you can't "make more daylight" or even "save" it. The amount of daylight is set by the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the Earth's axial tilt, NOT by some arbitrary clock setting. All DST does is de-tune people from the natural rhythms of nature. It's illusory and false. That is all. .... by the way, how the heck does one get a carriage return to actually work in these comments. my paragraphs always get run together ...... :D
Naw...can't do that... It's gotta be someone or something else's fault!
In jobs where they have shift-rotation (monitoring something 24hours/day), shift-rotation plays all sorts of havoc with people's biological clocks -- much more severely than DST...
I wonder if there is a reciprocal effect on the shift to 'Standard' -- i.e. do health problems rise, or do they fall? I.e. is it the change in time or the 1 hour less sleep we have over a weekend?
To the person with health probs "caused" by DST -- seriously, just think about planning the shift over 10 days. I.e. change the time you go to bed/get up by 6 minutes a day starting 5 days before the change. It should be gradual enough to not disrupt your body clock.
Also you might find melatonin or tryptophan to help shift your body clock. I found it useful to "pre-shift" my body-clock to 'European-time" when I went on vacation, so I had no jet-lag when I got there (I wanted to enjoy the short time I had there, so I did the time-adaptation before the trip).
Personally, I'd prefer we stay on DST all the time, as I'm usually a late riser, and if I want to do anything outdoors, the extra time in the evening helps -- but a true-computer geek wouldn't really care -- "what's daylight"?... :-)