If you’re in a one of the 48 states that currently practice daylight saving time, you change your “wall” clocks twice a year. In the spring, the annual period of daylight savings begins – with clocks jumping forward an hour ahead of standard time and staying on “daylight savings time” until mid-fall.
Right now, clocks across most of the country have fallen back an hour, as 2023’s Daylight Savings Time thankfully came to an end. Returning to standard time, as most of the U.S. does the first Sunday of November, is usually “the easier (time change) to adapt to, Abbott says, adding that she encourages people to “take advantage of that time to try to get a little bit of extra sleep.”
Still, it can be an adjustment. Martin notes that people who already struggle with sleep issues, like insomnia, and parents with infants are particularly impacted. “Most of us feel the disruption in the spring when we lose an hour of the nighttime – but even in the fall as we’re switching back, some people have a hard time adjusting,” Martin said. “It’s sort of like having a little bit of jet lag twice a year.”
Medical experts are continuing to stress daylight saving time’s health consequences – notably how time changes can throw off your sleep cycle. “It’s the same story every year,” Dr. Sabra Abbott, a Northwestern Medicine physician and associate professor of neurology in the school’s department of sleep medicine, said in an interview with USA TODAY.
“We’re dealing with competing clocks,” Abbott said, pointing to how our bodies usually follow the sun and not the time on our phones. How long sunlight lasts each day depends on the season and where you are geographically – but daylight saving time moves us farther away from the “sun clock,” experts say.
“During standard time, noon tends to be the point at which the sun is highest in the sky. But when we shift to daylight saving time, what happens is that relationship between the wall clock and the sun clock are clearly skewed,” Abbott said. That can result in less sleep.
Abbott adds that, while just about everyone wants to “get rid of the switch back and forth” that comes with two time changes each year, “the real question is, ‘Which direction should we go?’ … From sleep and health perspective, the best route seems to be permanent standard time.”
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