If you are like most people, you had a tough time going to sleep last night an hour earlier than your internal body clock felt was time for bed. Your body certainly thought getting up an hour earlier was pure torture. While changing the time in the fall to get an hour more sleep is hardly a bother (except for the missing hour of daylight), springing back and losing an hour of sleep in March is a health hazard. The following is from USA Today:
A lack of sleep has long been shown to be bad for our health. It can lead to declines in cardiovascular health, increases in diabetes and obesity, poorer mental health and lower cognitive performance, according to Johns Hopkins.
According to John Hopkins University, the transition to change the clocks can lead to higher risks of heart attack and stroke.
Mood disturbances, hospital admissions and elevated production of inflammatory markers in response to stress can also stem from the change, the university reported.
Additionally, car crashes can become more likely. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, found that the risk of fatal accidents rises by 6% after the switch, according to a 2020 study.
Indeed, having more light in the evening makes it even harder to fall asleep on time. This is especially true for people living on the Western edge of a time zone (I grew up less than 20 miles East of the border between Central Time and Mountain Time).
When did this madness begin?
The idea of daylight saving time dates back to more than a hundred years ago and was essentially devised to increase evening sunlight and conserve energy. The adjustment was formally adopted in World War I.
The practice was observed off and on in the following years. In 1966, the Uniform Time Act made daylight saving time a legal requirement, according to the Department of Transportation. The country began following the current March to November system in 2007.
Congress periodically attempts to make daylight savings time permanent or standard time permanent. Everyone I know claims to hate changing the time twice a year. Yet, for some obscure reason it persists. Our hatred for daylight savings time (or at least changing our clocks twice a year) has become so ingrained that it is like lawmakers are afraid to deprive us of something cultural that we bond over while complaining about. There have been previous attempts to make daylight savings time permanent:
In December 1973, amid an energy crisis, President Nixon signed into law a bill for year-round Daylight Saving Time as one way to reduce the nation’s energy consumption. TIME reported back then that the hope was that “setting clocks ahead one hour could reduce nighttime electrical use and shave about 2% off the nation’s demand for energy.”
Permanent daylight savings time was quickly abandoned after children were struck by cars whose drivers could not see them in the dark. For most children turning the clocks forward meant walking to school in the dark. That was more than 50 years ago. If you have driven by a school in the morning around 8:00AM you would know that small children no longer walk to school. Their parents queue up in long lines to drop them off, but the experience was traumatic. Every time the idea of permanent daylight savings time is raised, policymakers point to the failed experiment back in 1974. We keep changing our clocks twice a year for the children.
While everyone agrees that changing our clocks should stop, nobody can agree on whether to make standard time permanent of daylight savings time permanent. A bill in Congress filed in February, the Daylight Act of 2026, would split the difference. It would move standard time forward 30 minutes and make it permanent. That does not sound particularly appealing either.
Read more at USA Today: Daylight saving time is bad for our health, studies say. Why hasn’t it changed?
TIME: The U.S. Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time Before