Enduring Permanent Daylight Saving Time Poses Health Threats, Expert Says

Medical professionals continue to emphasize the health repercussions of daylight saving time, particularly how time shifts may disrupt your sleep pattern.

The conclusion of daylight saving time has arrived once more, an autumn ritual in which the United States, Europe, the majority of Canada, and a handful of other nations set their clocks back an hour in a type of Groundhog Day trust October. We'll bring them ahead (again) come spring when governments reinstate daylight saving time.

Human bodies tend to follow the sun rather than the clock on their phones. The length of daylight each day varies depending on the season and location, however, daylight saving time pulls us further off from the "sun clock."

Throughout standard time, noon is the moment when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. However, when we go to daylight saving time, the link between the wall clock and the sun clock becomes plainly distorted, as per Dr. Sabra Abbott, a Northwestern Medicine doctor and associate neurology professor in the university's department of sleep medicine, as she told USA Today.

US Sunshine Protection Act of 2021

The United States Senate, which supported the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 in March, says no, and if it is made legal, Daylight Saving Time will be permanent. The effort to eliminate the outmoded practice of changing the clocks is gaining traction across the country, according to Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who filed the measure in the US Senate initially, following a CNN report.

In 2018, the Florida legislature agreed to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in the state, but it cannot take effect unless it also becomes federal law. The bill must still pass the US House of Representatives and also be signed into law by the President.

Meanwhile, a growing number of sleep specialists believe that advancing our clocks in the springtime is detrimental to human health. Throughout the last 25 years, studies have shown that the one-hour adjustment upsets physiological patterns adjusted to the Earth's rotation, lending credence to the argument over whether Daylight Saving Time is a good concept in any form.

Dr. Elizabeth Klerman said that she is one of the many sleep specialists that recognized the idea as horrible, and remarked that the biological clock is maintained by (natural) light, not by the clock on the human wall, and indicated that there is also no indication that the human body completely adjusts to the new setting.

(Photo : Getty Images)
Our bodies need the early morning light to set our internal body clock, experts say.

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Importance of Sleeping Patterns

While our body clocks are even one hour away from the solar day-night cycle, humans establish what sleep experts call "social jet lag." Research findings have demonstrated that social jet lag raises the likelihood of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, raises the likelihood of developing disease and stroke, impacts firm mood disturbances such as depressive episodes, tends to affect the gastrointestinal and endocrine systems, and narrows our sleeping patterns. It can even lower life expectancy.

A 2003 study discovered that obtaining one hour less sleep for two weeks produced the same impact on memory and motor functions as going no sleep for two long nights. In another study, cutting bedtime by 90 minutes from said prescribed 7 to 8 hours for grownups changed their DNA of immune growth and cell inflammation, a major cause of chronic illness.

Making the time change permanent would exacerbate the long-term effects of any sleep loss, not only because "humans must report working an hour earlier for an additional five months each year, but also since body clocks are likely later in winter than during the summer concerning the sun clock," following an assertion from of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. The conjunction of DST with winter will thus exacerbate the discrepancies between body clocks and social clocks, severely impacting one's health.