On Sunday morning, when my alarm clock rang to signal the de facto end of my spring break, my internal clock was still pretty sure it was 6 a.m., a time of day otherwise known to college students as “too early to be awake.” My phone, on the other hand, had switched dutifully to daylight saving time and was reading the very slightly more reasonable hour of 7 a.m.: Time to get up and make the drive back to school. The dissonance was, as it always is, momentarily confusing, but it resolves itself more quickly every year.
The resulting bitter, cheated feeling when it does is one that is familiar to over a billion people in 70 countries. So let me take out our collective frustration: DST is a pointless, cruel annual exercise that punishes people who sleep responsibly on a regular schedule, and we should all join Arizona and stop using it.
DST was originally instituted in America during World War I, with the intent of saving money on electricity by making better use of daylight. It makes sense on a certain level. If we orient our day around the time spent in the sun during a given season, we should be using less electricity, saving energy and money. And who doesn’t want to save energy and money?
But recently we’ve started to question whether DST actually works for that purpose. As far as energy consumption is concerned, it might have worked in 1918, only 16 years after air conditioning was invented. In fact, it might have worked up until the mid- to late-20th century, before which air conditioning wasn’t common in American homes. But these days, having our day oriented around daylight in the summer means that since we’re awake and active when it’s hot out, we want our homes air-conditioned for longer than we would if not for DST.
The actual effect of that increased demand might have been difficult to measure if not for the state of Indiana, which only started using DST statewide in 2006, well after the proliferation of in-home cooling systems. Studies of their consumption before and after institution found that energy usage actually increased, costing the state an extra nine million in power. While this effect isn’t uniform across the country by any measure, there’s reason to believe that whether or not it saves energy happens on a geographic, state-by-state basis, with much more energy being used in damp, hot states such as Florida, but perhaps little to no effect in cooler states.
A common misconception about DST is that it was implemented to help farmers by extending the light for the work day. Another widely-believed myth is that it was intended to keep children from having to wait for the school bus in the dark. These things are not only not quite true: They’re the exact opposite of the truth. Farmers routinely object to the disruption of their schedule — they were actually one of the last holdouts against nationwide implementation — and DST means that children will actually be waiting outside before the sun comes up.
There are two groups that consistently lobby for DST— the golf lobby and the Department of Commerce. When there’s more daylight, sports like golf get more playing time and, theoretically, people getting off work while it’s still light outside would stop and shop, giving small businesses a boost. Whether this actually helps small businesses is debatable, since there’s no real proof to support that it does — and, as we’ve established, it’s probably costing them money to air condition their stores.
Not only is it not helpful to the majority of people, recent studies have indicated it might actually be harmful. One study found that risk of heart attack was 10 percent higher in the two days after we spring forward. In the same two days, another study found an average 8 percent increase in stroke risk. There are also indications that risk of suicide increases. These risks are probably due to stress caused by disruption of the body’s normal sleep cycles — the effects of sleep deprivation itself are completely separate.
When workers in concentration-heavy, ability-intensive jobs such as construction, trucking or factory work drift off, workplace injuries spike. When we’re too tired to pay attention to where we’re driving, we get into more car accidents.
So if DST, aside from making people worldwide feel disoriented and exhausted, isn’t providing the benefits it’s supposed to, and has unintended — and dangerous — consequences, why keep it? Are we sentimental? Too lazy to abolish it? Scared to lose the 7 percent drop in robberies it causes in the week after the change? Really invested in golf?
Whatever it is, we need to get over it. It’s time to join countries such as Chile and Azerbaijan and give me back my hour of sleep.