Note: This week’s Pretty Good features a long-held and strongly-voiced opinion about one of this time of year’s hot topics, which is often misunderstood. It comes from none other than my wife, which means that, yes, this call is coming from inside the house. Enjoy.
If your social media algorithms are anything like mine, twice a year, it is impossible to escape the Instagram reels and TikToks, the enduring message of which are all the same: “I HATE Daylight Savings.” The complaints in the fall, about how it’s dark at 4 p.m. The whining in the spring, about losing an hour of sleep. Nobody ever seems happy around the time shifts, but we all need to be clear about what daylight saving time actually is—the time we follow from March-November, not simply the act of switching between that and standard time—and what we should do if we’re all so unhappy about the switching.
Before the global synchronization of clocks, there was simply light and dark. Humans have been attempting to standardize time since basically forever, with ancient Egyptians credited with the creation of the 24-hour day, but standard time as we know it did not exist until railroads did. Prior to the advent of standard time in 1884, local time was simply kept by solar time—you can see why this would be confusing for train schedules. When the 24 global standard time zones were set, they were set to have the center of each time zone align with solar noon, or when the sun is directly overhead.
Daylight saving time (please, for the love of god, note that there is no “s” on the end of “saving”) was implemented in the United States as a temporary measure in 1918, during World War I. This was designed to be an impermanent, seven-month, resource-saving measure. The logic was that if working hours were aligned with daytime hours, people would consume less energy. It was implemented again during World War 2, and immediately repealed again upon conclusion of the war.
Whether or not jurisdictions maintained DST was a bit of a free-for-all until 1966, when the Uniform Time Act was passed, implementing the biannual back-and-forth switch we know and loathe today.
Since 1966, we have inched closer and closer to permanent daylight saving time. The original framework set in 1966 designated six months of daylight time. That was expanded to seven months of DST in 1986, and then again to eight months in 2005. In 2022, the Senate, for some reason, spent its time (Kim, there’s people that are dying) passing the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021. It passed, but never advanced to the House. Marco Rubio introduced the same bill again in spring of this year, because “the ritual of changing time twice a year is stupid.”
If that quote from Rubio, and the slew of TikToks I’m served each March and November are any indication, the act of switching back and forth between daylight saving time and standard time each year seems to be pretty universally unpopular. Rubio’s solution to this is making daylight saving time permanent, largely citing economic reasons.
But we’re not talking about changing the tilt of the Earth and actually giving ourselves more daylight hours. Although, reading through the quotes of support for the bill from other Senators makes it seem like some of them may think that is the case.
Ed. I’m disappointed! Unless you have some insane powers we’re all unaware of (in which case, use them more wisely please) you most certainly will not “deliver more sun” during the middle of winter. You will simply turn a 4:15 sunset into a 5:15 sunset, and a 7:10 sunrise into an 8:10 sunrise. But your darkest day will still only be a measly 9 hours and 4 minutes!
This is actually one of the less egregious statements, but since when has Tommy Tuberville kept a promise?
Common sense would also tell us that you are not actually adding more daylight by making daylight saving time permanent, but here we all are. Also, an average December in Portland, Oregon has a high of 46 degrees, with 15 days of rain. I am hesitant to believe that the sun setting at 4:30 instead of 5:30 is what is keeping people from going on a “sunny stroll.”
I can perhaps forgive your 9-to-5 office worker, who may spend all their daylight hours either commuting to and sitting in an office, for feeling frustrated by a lack of daylight once work is over. But these people are running the country! For a group of people who love to tout reforms like these as “common sense,” it’s alarming that it doesn’t seem to be common sense to them that any daylight hour added to the end of the day simply comes from the morning. And, as history has shown us, dark mornings aren’t so popular either.
At least that was the prevailing sentiment in the ‘70s, when daylight saving time was actually made permanent, and swiftly repealed. Richard Nixon implemented permanent DST in January 1974, as an energy saving measure during the oil crisis. At the time, 79% of the public supported this expansion of DST…until it actually was implemented. In the first week, eight Florida children were killed while going to school in the dark. It only took one winter of that for public support to drop to 42%, and the expansion was repealed in October of the same year.
How dark would those mornings be? Let’s use my home of Washington, D.C. as an example. D.C.’s latest sunrise in the winter is (in standard time) 7:27 a.m. on Jan. 4, 5, and 6. If we switched to daylight saving time permanently, the sun on these dates would set at 5:59 or 6:00 p.m., instead of 4:59 or 5:00 p.m., which sounds nice. But the sun would not rise until 8:27 a.m. In Indianapolis, a place so far west in its time zone that the sun already rises at 8:06 a.m. in standard time in early January…well, you can do the math. Whether or not any individual person feels that a 9:00 a.m. sunrise is a fair trade for a 6:30 p.m. sunset is certainly a matter of personal preference, but there are real public health impacts to stealing morning daylight for the evening.
When you bring a new baby home, one of the many things you may find yourself fretting over is whether or not your little one seems to have their days and nights confused. This is common for young infants, and easy to resolve. Exposing them to sunlight during the day, specifically early in the day, sets their circadian rhythm, allowing them to better regulate their sleep and wake cycles.
But morning sunlight isn’t just key for newborns—it regulates all of our circadian rhythms, each day. Our internal body clocks don’t exactly align to a perfect 24 hours. The default is a little longer, more like 24 hours and 30 minutes (this Washington Post infographic is very helpful…read it). Morning sunlight exposure resets that clock each day, allowing us to feel more awake during the day, and to sleep better at night.
Remember that standard time was set to align with solar noon? Our bodies also have a human history’s worth of alignment to waking when it’s light and sleeping at night. A shift to daylight saving time is causing an intentional circadian misalignment. And there are real, measurable, negative side effects to living in permanent circadian misalignment.
We already have a natural experiment at play highlighting this. Since standard time was set to the center of each time zone aligned to solar noon, this means that cities in the far west borders of their time zone (like Indianapolis) are a good example of what it’s like to live in permanent daylight saving time, from a solar noon misalignment perspective. And it’s not good! There are studies showing increases in cancer rates, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases in cities on the western borders of their time zones—all issues associated with circadian misalignment.
A common refrain from proponents of making daylight saving time permanent is that it will help those with Seasonal Affective Disorder (hilariously acronymed SAD). But—and I can tell you this as someone with clinically diagnosed seasonal depression!—the opposite is actually true. One of the first-line treatments for seasonal depression is light therapy, and the recommendation is to use your light box each morning. Morning light therapy has been found to “bring patients with depression into remission.” There’s nothing magic in these lamps—they are simply replicating the effect the morning sun has on us and our all-important circadian rhythms.
Personally, I don’t mind the bi-annual time shift. It seems silly to me to have pre-5 a.m. sunrises in summer (what a waste!). But shifting an hour of daylight from morning to evening is far less disruptive when days are so long and sunrises already so early.
But in the winter? I quite literally can’t imagine ever successfully getting myself out of bed even remotely on time if we weren’t in standard time, and the thought of my child and all of her classmates having to walk to school in the pitch dark makes me shudder. In the dead of winter, everywhere in the continental United States has about 9-10 hours of sunlight. It’s hard to set that small of a daylight window into anything palatable, as long as we’re all expected to work eight-hour days. (Editor’s note: How about a shorter workday in the winter? Care to take this one up, Congress? Imagine your approval-rate boost!)
If broader public opinion is leaning towards sticking with one time all year long to save the hassle and (very real) disruption the shift causes, it simply has to be standard time. And if you feel differently…at least don’t call it daylight savings.