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Last year, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) issued a statement calling for an end to daylight saving time in favor of “national, fixed, year-round time.”
Their call for a halt to decades of practice in the United States comes in a year when the early sunset will suddenly feel even gloomier due to the limitations of COVID. A handful of states in multiple time zones – from California to Oregon to Arkansas to Tennessee – are also talking about eliminating this.
AASM claims that the negative health effects of setting the watch twice a year outweigh its benefits. “The abundance of accumulated evidence suggests that the sharp transition from standard time to summer time poses significant risks to public health and safety,” the statement said.
They write that moving forward is associated with a temporary increase in heart rate and stroke, and both moving forward and backward clocks appear to cause a higher rate of sleep problems, mood disorders and suicide (not to mention more cars failures and missed meetings). Another recent report published in PLOS computational biology estimates that each spring clock change could be associated with up to 880,000 “negative health effects” worldwide and 150,000 in the United States
Much of this comes down to how daylight saving time affects our circadian rhythm. It may not seem like much, but going back an hour is enough to confuse our body’s internal clock. The resulting circadian mismatch is associated with a higher risk of heart disease, obesity and diabetes. And although you can assume that this flash passes in a few days, there are some studies that suggest that its effects may last for months.
“It’s a mismatch of your biological rhythms or circadian rhythms for eight months of the year,” said Beth Mallow, MD, professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. Scientific American daylight saving time.
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