Switching to permanent daylight saving time won’t — and didn’t — work
One of the very few advantages of being old — senior discounts aside — is that you can recognize dumb ideas when they come around again every few decades, like chucklehead Halley’s comets.
Now we have the Sunshine Protection Act, passed by the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent. It is now up to the House of Representatives to do the right thing — table it, refer it to the subcommittee on timepiece regulation, reconsider it, talk it to death, let it just drift away.
The Sunshine Protection
Act — how exactly do you protect sunshine? Put an umbrella over it? — would institute year-round daylight saving time, starting in November 2023. It would save people the trouble of springing forward an hour in the spring, then falling back an hour in the fall.
Proponents say it will extend afternoon daylight by an hour, so late winter afternoons would be brighter — more time for being outdoors, more time for shopping. Everything will be brighter. Kids will spend more time outside (away from their computers?) People will buy more things.
Only we’ve done this before. Old people remember.
During the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, President Richard Nixon instituted year-round daylight saving time as an energy-saving measure.
It didn’t save energy. But full-time daylight saving time meant kids were getting on school buses in the pitch dark — because the clocks were moved forward by an hour, the sun was rising at 8 a.m., rather than 7 a.m.
So, after 10 months, Congress ended the experiment and a grateful nation went back to the same old, same old.
“Everybody hated it,” said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.
Permanent daylight saving time has been tried elsewhere, with the same result.
“They tried it in Russia, they tried it in Pakistan,” said Dr. Karin Johnson, the medical director of the Baystate Regional Sleep Medicine Program in Springfield, Mass. “Everywhere they try it, it fails.’’
For the truth is, we only get so much light each day as we orbit the sun — more in the summer, less in the winter. We just set our clocks around to apportion it out. We cannot save daylight any more than we can protect it.
Johnson is on the board of directors of Save Standard Time, a national group of sleep medicine physicians who believe we should adopt daylight standard time — winter time — as our year-round norm.
The reason for this, she said, is that our bodies respond better, and we sleep better, with more sun in the mornings, more darkness in the evenings.
We’re creatures who have evolved to live with the sun rising and sun setting. It’s our circadian rhythm — our internal clock.
Only, being modern human beings, we have lights to keep us up. Teenagers are the worst.
“We have artificial lights, computer screens, our phones,” said Dr. Jose Mendez, a pulmonologist who is medical director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Danbury Hospital.
Mendez is agnostic when it comes to favoring standard time over daylight saving time. Either works for him. What he and Johnson agree on is that the spring forward in March deprives people of an hour of sleep. It’s like a collective jet lag. People need a few days to recover.
“An adult should get 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep a night,” Mendez said. “But we’ve got too much stress in our lives. We’re already sleep-deprived.”
“I admit it,” said Chester of the Naval Observatory of the hour shift. “As I get older, it gets harder to manage.”
Johnson of the Baystate Regional sleep center said being on permanent daylight saving time will only make us more sleep-deprived. Some people will be able to sleep in until the sun rises. Others will be starting their day in darkness and not seeing the sun until their coffee break. More sunlight in the afternoon won’t make up for that.
In Danbury, the sun rose at 7:15 a.m. last year on Dec. 21, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Under the Sunlight Protection Act, it will be 8:15 a.m. In places like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the sun won’t rise until around 9:30 a.m.
Chester said Native American have a saying about our clock manipulations
“They say only the federal government can cut an inch off a quilt, sew it on to the other end of the quilt and say it’s longer,” he said.