I love having an extra hour of sleep in the fall. What I don’t love, however, is losing that hour of sleep in the spring time.
Benjamin Franklin came up with daylight saving time to conserve candles and work hours. Fair, but time is a concept invented by man and daylight savings time doesn’t actually save daylight. There are the same number of hours in a day. Sure, there’s less daylight in the winter, but changing the clock won’t give us more daylight in the winter. Do you know why? Because it’s winter. Now it’s dark at six o’clock when I’m barely getting off work and I have to walk to my car in the dark with a Taser in my hand, when just last week I felt perfectly safe not only walking to my car but walking to the bus stop. Hardly anyone uses candles for light anymore.
You know how at certain times of the day you get hungry or sleepy? That’s a natural function of your circadian rhythm. A jump in time, say, daylight savings twice a year, screws up those rhythms and makes us hungry or sleepy before or after we’re supposed to be. This makes us crabby and weakens our immune systems. It causes car crashes and heart attacks.
The loss of sleep in the springtime isn’t just disorienting but it can affect our test scores. Two years ago, DST happened the day before I took the ACT. I tried to go to sleep early but my circadian rhythm stopped me from falling asleep on time and I was exhausted in the morning. As if the ACT isn’t stressful enough, add a sleepy brain and the result is a disappointing score that no one gets to know.
Daylight saving time doesn’t help conserve energy either because, instead of turning on lamps and lights and the AC at night, they’re turned on in the morning. Even if it were darker in the summer at night than in the morning, who actually uses that many lights in the summer? All daylight savings time does is cause the sun to be up an hour after everyone tries to go to bed and makes it dark outside when people are on the way to school or work, forcing everyone to change their sleeping patterns.
Those who like DST like it because they enjoy having light after dinner so they can enjoy more activities at night. But did anyone ever think that maybe in the spring, we’re not going an hour ahead so much as we’re switching to normal time? Who decided that normal time is when it’s dark as hell at six o clock? If people like it when it’s lighter at night, then why don’t we keep time the same year-round? This next daylight saving time should be our last.