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What if you are traveling overnight by train during the time we are switching our clocks back an hour? You will probably be stuck in a train station an hour longer than you expected. Amtrak trains have a scheduled time to run by, so in October when we change the clocks back by one hour, all trains stop at 2:00 am and wait for the hour before they resume their scheduled trips. Come March’s time change, they will probably be behind schedule with one hour, but that is alright because we all know: that when Amtrak is late, they are actually on time!
The tricky problem of Daylight Saving Time comes, depending on each country’s current laws, every Spring (March or April) and every Fall (October or November). Although some people agree that changing hours will save energy, more studies have been done to prove has a negative impact on our health.
Daylight Saving Time was first proposed in 1895 by a New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson, but his idea did not come to life. Then, in 1907, William Willett, a British builder proposed to add 20 minutes to each Sunday in April, and to cut them back on each of the Sundays in September (Downing, 2005). He loved horseback riding and he wanted to have more time during the day to practice his hobby. He tried to lobby his idea around Great Britain and along with more recreational opportunities, Willett argued that this would lower lighting costs. In July 1908, Thunder Bay in Ontario, Canada became the first city in the world to use Daylight Saving Time (DST). Years later, the first European country to adopt the summertime was Germany on April 30, 1916, during the First World War. The UK (where the tradition is called Summer Time), Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania followed. The United States followed 2 years later when the law “An act to preserve daylight and provide standard time, for the United States” was enacted on March 19, 1918 (United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Interstate Commerce, 1918). Today, 70 countries around the world are using this mechanism (www.webexhibits.org).
According to the Time Zone Convention, watches all over the world show the same minute and second for each point on Earth, but the difference in hours is given by the fact that every 15 degrees of longitude gives an extra hour. So, it was decided that the time would be advanced one hour ahead of Greenwich Time. The countries around the Equator have 12 hours equally in the daytime and nighttime, so they do not have a need to observe Daylight Saving Time. Compared with that, the Northern and Southern hemisphere countries have longer days and shorter nights, and it was agreed that gaining an hour during the summertime will help with the tourism industry. This industry has welcomed the shift to the summertime, arguing that one extra hour of natural light makes people spend more time on the streets, spending more money on activities such as festivals, shopping, and concerts (www.webexhibits.org).
The main reason for introducing and maintaining summertime has been, and still is, closely related to energy saving, especially for electric lighting, because all activities are done better during the day when the sun is up. There is a consensus that summertime contributes to a reduction in electricity demand during the peak hours of the evening, but this can be ‘offset’ by an increase in demand in the morning when we wake up in the dark. Also, summertime arguments claim that more natural light can counteract or prevent power outages and other electrical failures, influencing people to spend more time outside the house and, therefore, use fewer household appliances. Michael Downing, a professor at Tufts University in Boston, and author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time (2009), argues energy saving is wrong because if the demand for electricity decreases, gas usage will increase, and in the end, there would be no energy saved.
Many people have the impression that summertime has been introduced for farmers. But the problem is that especially cow farmers are against the change of time, both in spring and fall, because it changes the cow’s milking time. Cows like routine and their comfort zone is disturbed by the time changing. The first week after the time change, cows are kept on the same schedule and the process of changing their schedules starts with 30-minute increments over 2 days (www.americandairy.com).
In addition to the few benefits of the time change, it seems that the balance tends to leverage the negative effects it generates. Many studies have highlighted the reasons why switching to summertime is unnecessary and has a negative impact on our health.
Experts warn that any change is a stressful factor for the body. Switching itself to the summertime is an effort that the body can adapt relatively easily, but this also depends on the physical and mental particularities of each body, because our daily routine can be overwhelmed with the change. Physicians think that people need about a week to adapt to the summertime because they need to wake up an hour earlier than they got used to (Kantermann, Juda, Merrow, & Roenneberg, 2007). For those who suffer from certain health problems, the effects of changing the biological rhythm could be more serious. Of course, it is a matter of accommodation that can take a few days or a few weeks, depending on each person, but it remains a major problem.
It seems that the human body cannot adapt easily to the summertime and it influences our biological clock, according to the study reported in Current Biology (2007) by experts from Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. They warned that this effect is more pronounced for people who are used to waking up early in the morning. Changing the time can disrupt the biological clock, and hormonal disturbances can occur, especially regarding melatonin, the hormone responsible for regulating the biological clock of the body.
An interesting thing that emerges from DTS is the increase in traffic accidents. Although there are also opinions that the number of accidents would diminish when we change the time because we drive more during the daylight, studies have shown that the weekend after the summer shift shows an increase in those accidents. People have just lost an hour of sleep, and they become more jerky, tired, and therefore more inattentive. Prats-Uribe, Tobías and Prieto-Alhambra (2017) showed that “DST changes are associated with a cost of 1.5 lives every year due to road traffic accidents” (pg.2). The findings from their study were inconclusive, with results suggesting that shifting light by adjusting time can have positive or negative road safety consequences, which requires more research to be done specially for the long term effect of DTS (2 or more weeks after the time changing and not only the weekend after).
The week after the Daylight Changing Time is the base for a lot of medical studies all over the world. In one of these studies published in Sleep Medicine, Sipilä, Ruuskanen, Rautava, and Kyoto, looked at 10 years of data and concluded that Daylight Saving Time increases the risk of ischemic stroke by 8% during the first two days after the transition (2016). In another study done by Janszky and Ljung in 2008 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they explain that “the effect of the spring transition to daylight saving time on the incidence of acute myocardial infarction was somewhat more pronounced in women than in men, and the autumn effect was more pronounced in men than in women (pg.1)”.
Why is this tradition increasing the risk of men committing suicide within a few weeks after summer (Berk, Dodd, Hallam, Berk, Gleeson & Henry, 2008) Or why changing hours can affect mental health in extreme cases? The unusual change of the hour raises the circadian rhythm, which reduces the body’s ability to cope with stress and shocks. Switching to summertime may trigger a decrease in alertness and even fatigue. In fact, it’s somewhat logical, that the unusual change of the hour raises the circadian rhythm, which reduces the body’s ability to cope with stress and shocks. Research has continued and has revealed increasing stress levels in terms of losing one hour of sleep, continuing with the difficulty of concentration and learning that we face at work/school (Berk et al., 2008).
By invoking the unjustified disturbance of the population health, and that losses in various socio-economic areas outweigh the gains, some countries have given up the change of winter-summer time or have never applied it. The European Commission has recently proposed to abandon Daylight Saving Time for Europe, starting in 2019. All the member countries of the Commission have the freedom to decide, until April of 2019, if they wish to apply in the summer or winter time. Economist William F. Shughart estimated the cost of Daylight Saving Time, and in 2008 he realized that this tradition costs the United States $1.7 billion per year (Shughart II, 2008).
The State of Washington’s Senators have filed a law this year asking to keep their winter time permanently (Honeyford, Hunt, Van de Wege, Fortunato, & Pedersen, 2019). The law argues that “research has shown that changing to and from Daylight Saving Time twice per year has negative impacts on public health, increases traffic accidents and crime, disrupts agriculture scheduling, and hinders economic growth” (par 2). If approved, it will allow the state of Washington to remain in Daylight Saving Time year-round, joining other states and territories that currently observe Daylight Saving Time year-round (Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Minor Outlying Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Arizona, except for Navarro Tribe) (www.webexhibits.org).
Daylight Saving Time does affect our health and if we keep or not the summertime forever, only time will decide.
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