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."

Comments

Natural Selection!

[notommy]

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.

Re:Time to solve the problem

[C_amiga_fan]

Daylight Savings Time is as pointless as forcing people to switch to Fluorescent Bulbs. Whatever energy is saved is so small (one-tenth of a percent) as to be trivial in the total economy, and the side effects (high expense, mercury, damage to sick persons) are worse than the original problem.

Better to just use the existing schedule/ technology.

Re:Yep

[dadioflex]

Hmmm. That would make you an evolutionary dead-end.

I'm all for technology empowering folk and making the extraordinary ordinary.

If you're a tech writer or worker and you suffer from some of these too minimal to care disorders, maybe you should bite the bullet and ask for special circumstances from your employer.

The rest of us, the majority... we live in perpetual Twilight. We don't need sunlight to wake us, or moonlight to send us asleep. We sleep when we're tired and wake up when we have to.

Evolution is a bitch. Get better or die trying.

Re:Time to solve the problem

[C_amiga_fan]

Start with a faulty assumption and you get invalid results.

The article you quote doesn't take into account the 10,000 mile journey of those CFLs from China to the USA, which means CFLs use *more* energy... or assuming best case: Break even. Nor does it take into account the Chinese factories' lack of pollution controls, which generate ~100,000 times more soot and ozone-destroying chemicals than a US or EU factory building the old, standard bulbs.