It happened again this weekend. The dreaded “spring forward” date forcing all of us to adjust our clocks and lose a precious hour of sleep. Whose brilliant idea was this anyway? More on that in a moment. But first let me detail what a dumb idea Daylight Saving Time is (BTW: Contrary to public usage of the term, there is no “S” at the end of “Daylight.” Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Seems to me that a 60-minute correction is surely plural!) But I digress.
In addition to the aforementioned loss of sleep time and annoying need to adjust clocks twice a year, there are scientific reasons why DST is a bad idea. According to an article on timeanddate.com, DST “can cause disruptions to our body clock, otherwise known as the circadian rhythm.” The article also cites a Swedish study that found increased risk of heart attack the first three weekdays after the time change. The article goes on to report studies that tiredness leads to an increase in traffic accidents, workplace injuries and even potential miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients.
But wait! There’s more. DST studies suggest it can trigger mental illness issues, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and more.
To my way of thinking, there is only one positive benefit to the time change — the recommendation that people use this as motivation to check their smoke detector batteries. Did you? Probably not.
There was a time when I took a certain amount of pride that Indiana was one of only two places in the continental US that didn’t observe DST. The other was Arizona. Since my son lived in AZ for a time, there was never any confusion when we needed to call one another. And speaking of confusion, I can’t tell you how often clients and vendors from Chicago showed up at the wrong time for scheduled appointments with me in South Bend. Thank you, former Governor Daniels.
Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t add a personal story. My mother was obsessed with punctuality. The only time she was ever late for anything was my graduation from college. You guessed it. It was time change weekend.
So, who’s to blame for this political clockness? According to Wikipedia: “Historically, several ancient societies adopted seasonal changes to their timekeeping to make better use of daylight; Roman timekeeping even included changes to water clocks. In a satirical letter to the editor of the Journal de Paris in 1784, Benjamin Franklin suggested that if Parisians could only wake up earlier in the summer they would economize on candle and oil usage… The first implementation of DST was by Port Arthur (today merged into Thunder Bay), in Ontario, Canada, in 1908, but only locally, not nationally. The first nation-wide implementations were by the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, both starting on 30 April 1916. Since then many countries have adopted DST at various times, particularly since the 1970s energy crisis.”
There you have it. Definitive proof of yet another duplicitous conspiracy to deprive us of our time-honored freedom of sleep.