Please Abolish Daylight Savings: A Health First Choice

The week of March 8 was creepy. All the children were falling apart. Adults were grumpy and disoriented. Everyone seemed to have a hangover. The unexplained meltdowns dragged on into April.

Numerous studies show that daylight savings time is unhealthy, especially for children and the elderly. These demographics in particular need good sleep, which is disrupted by daylight savings time. Daylight savings leads to increased heart attacks, strokes, and depression. These medical disasters accompany “spring forward” (when we lose an hour of sleep) but not “fall back” (when we return to sun time).

No journal of sleep or medicine supports daylight savings time. Instead, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Medical Association, the National Sleep Foundation, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, and the European Sleep Research Society all support permanent standard time.

If daylight savings is harmful and unnatural, then why has it persisted? Part of the blame lies with the candy lobby, who want children to stay up an hour later trick-or-treating on Halloween. Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, relates that “In the 1985 hearing on Daylight Savings, candy-makers put candy pumpkins on the seat of every senator, hoping to win a little favor.” These drug lords—I mean, candy tycoons—are teaming up with lawmakers to turn children into sugar addicts.

But the candy lobby is not alone. Retail, golf, tourism, and oil also push for daylight savings. The petroleum industry noticed a connection between daylight savings and consumer spending as early as 1930. With more daylight, people spend money doing unnecessary fun things. In short, we sacrifice our health to prop up the economy. We are waking up earlier just to spend more money.

Oddly enough, daylight savings was first proposed in 1885 by a New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson. Hudson wanted more daylight hours to collect insects after work. William Willett also advocated for daylight savings in 1907 so he could play more golf.

Daylight savings has gotten more extreme over the past 40 years. It currently starts on the second Sunday in March. Before 2007, it started on the first Sunday in April. And before 1986, it started on the last Sunday in April. When Congress expanded daylight savings in 1987, The Clorox Company, owner of Kingsford Charcoal, said they stood to gain $100 million by selling additional grills and charcoal briquettes. More daylight, more barbecue!

Everyone likes summer. We are all a little bit like Superman: the sun heals us. And sometimes we blame standard time for our depression in the winter. But the truth is that we should be sleeping more in the winter. We are acting like bears because we should be hibernating. Biohacker Thaddeus Owens argues that instead of sleeping eight hours a night, we should rise and set with the sun.

In the past months, I have tried waking up and going to bed with the sun. I sat in the backyard while I ate my breakfast and napped in the front yard in the afternoon, soaking up the Vitamin D and assisting Mother Nature’s circadian rhythms. Perhaps it’s a placebo, but I notice an improvement in my mood when I begin and end the day with the sun. Watching the sun rise reminds me that Christ will come from the East in terrible majesty to judge the living and the dead.

Before the invention of clocks, society was governed by the sundial, and the twelve “hours” of the day were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. Rising and falling with the sun meant that people slept as few as nine hours in the summer and as many as 14 hours in the winter. In agrarian societies, there is much more work to do in the fields in June and July than in December and January. It’s almost like God planned it that way.

But what does God, nature, or reason have to do with legislation anymore? Money is all that matters. And yet, perhaps measuring human welfare by the GDP is harming the family. As Jon Schweppe has argued, stay-at-home moms are a drag on the economy if we measure success by paying others to do things. It would be better if each mother paid another woman to rear her children for her. Then we could all contribute to the GDP!

Does our country exist to make us healthy or wealthy? Should we sacrifice the health of all for the wealth of some? Should lawmakers listen to special interest lobbyists or sleep experts? The young, healthy, and rich (the ones who love golf, bug collecting, candy, and barbecue) have louder voices. The distraught children and the trauma victims in nursing homes will likely be ignored.

The idyllic dream of governing the day by the sundial is perhaps too far gone to recall. But artificially lengthening the day to boost certain divisions of the economy at the expense of our health is bordering on child and elder abuse. Get some sleep y’all.