There is. You solve it by taking their phones away and sending them to bed earlier, not shifting the times of every public school in the state. But that is off-topic.
No, she’s saying there’s no evidence we fully adjust to it. The confusion may come from the assumption that “fully adjust” means how we FEEL. However, if you click on the link within the excerpt I posted, you’ll find that how we feel is NOT what Klerman was referring to (I’ve bolded the physical effects and one other major point for ease of reading):
More and more studies show that time differences between the social clock and the body clock challenge our health (Koopman et al., 2017; Mota et al., 2017; Parsons et al., 2015; Roenneberg et al., 2012; Rutters et al., 2014; Wong et al., 2015), are associated with decreased life expectancy (Borisenkov, 2011), shorten sleep (Borisenkov et al., 2017; Wittmann et al., 2006), cause mental (Foster et al., 2013; Levandovski et al., 2011) and cognitive problems (Díaz-Morales and Escribano, 2015; Haraszti et al., 2014), and contribute to the many sleep disturbances in our societies that are estimated to cost approximately 2% of the gross domestic product (Hafner et al., 2017). If we established DST throughout the year, the chronic effects would become more severe not only because we have to go to work an hour earlier for an additional 5 months every year but also because body clocks are usually later in winter than in summer with reference to the sun clock (Kantermann et al., 2007). The combination of DST and winter would therefore make the differences between body clocks and the social clock even worse and would negatively affect our health even more.
The CNN article (here’s the link again) adds/specifies diabetes and other metabolic disorders; stroke, heart disease, and digestive and endocrine disorders.
I hope this helps.
If people weren’t so welded to the clock it would be easier. Got to work at seven in the winter, eight in the summer. All DST does is fool people into thinking they’re doing things at the same time when, so far as the sun is concerned, they are not.
Isaac Asimov pointed this out in one of his columns years ago. If in this land of the free and home of the brave, he said, Congress mandated people get up an hour earlier in the summer there’s be protests you wouldn’t believe. But they pass the daylight savings bill – which does the exact same thing – and its swallowed without protest.
I mean, I think y’all might have cause and effect mixed up here. I think that kids’ practices get held during daylight hours, so if daylight hours are earlier, that’s when practices get held. I’m not really sure why practices happen so late, honestly.
In my kids’ leagues, it was so parents could get done with work and drive the kids to practice, and so the parent-coaches could volunteer without skipping work. This is the pre-teen leagues where kids can’t get there by themselves.
I’m sure many families could adjust to earlier hours. But it’s certainly going to favor those in the higher socioeconomic classes, who have a non-working parent or more flexible hours.
The start of the sub-discussion of timing of sports leagues sorta got lost along the way. The original post on sports leauges said in effect:
- *If* we arrange school and work starting times late enough so folks aren't going to school / work in the morning darkness, *then* for much of the year there won't be enough daylight left to have a full school / work day and then have kids sports afterwards before darkness falls.
Most of that was anecdotal which resulted in some state governors calling for a repeal. Post statistics after the Nixon administration circled the drain, and congress put an end to experimenting with time, found that children fatalities were no different than before the full time DST.
I won’t argue the stats. But I was a kid then and I know I hated slogging in snow when it was dark to get to my school busstop.
If I had to pick a change it would be to have permanent DST. I’m not a morning person, so I don’t care how early the sun rises, but I do care when the sun sets. Once we fall back to standard time in early November that’s the end of most after-work outdoor activities like sports practices. Lighted fields are mostly for events, not practices, and there’s sports like bicycling, cross country, rowing, etc. that can technically be done in the dark, but it’s a hurdle. That’s also about when the weather turns to garbage here (Cincinnati) too, but declining weather AND the loss of what little daylight was left is a major blow. For all of November, December, and January I’m going home from work in the dark, yuck.
I see the issue with school kids, but frankly we’re only in school for about 15% of our lives (keep in mind kids are only in school about 50% of the days in any year so the actual percentage is probably closer to 7 or 8%). School districts should set later start times if they’re in a location that’s too dark in the morning. Let them vary and don’t make the rest of us build our lives around this one particular concern.
Given the choice I’d rather have permanent daylight time, so I have an extra hour after work in the too-short Midwestern suburb to go bicycling , swimming, hanging out at the park, or whatever. As opposed to an extra hour before work in the morning where I’m trying to block it out of my bedroom window with blinds.
Different location, same opinion. More light in the AM does me no good as I get up and get ready for work in one continuous flow and that’s all. There’s no recreation or outdoor work incorporated into my wakeup routine.
Count me in the Standard time camp. We really don’t need an extra hour of daylight in the height of summer; it’s just more time for it to be ghastly-hot late in the day. I’d far rather have the sun come up at 5:30, rather than 6:30 in the summer- if I want to get something done in the daylight, it would be better in the morning. And 7:39 for sunset would be plenty late for almost anything anyone wants to do.
During DST, the astronomical sunset doesn’t happen until 8:39 PM on July 4th. That means that in practical terms, the fireworks don’t start until closer to 9:30 PM. And it’s still like 94 degrees at that point. But if you had to do something outside in the summer, you’re far better off waking up early and getting an extra hour of 75 to 80-ish degree temps in the morning, than extending the really hot late afternoon/evening temps.
The big benefit of Daylight Saving Time isn’t close to the solstice, it’s in the spring and fall where that extra hour is the difference between having time to do things outside after work or not.
Here, sunset on July 4th will be at 21:17. (But fireworks will be going off all day from 09:00 or 10:00 up to midnight.)
Here is a Scientific American report that claims that DST is bad for your health. Not the problems with changing, mainly that is bad for your health to use DST or indeed anything but natural time. I’m not sure I accept the argument but I offer it as one data point. The main point is that it disturbs your sleep rhythms.
My problem with all of these ‘bad for your health’ claims is that they are identical to claiming that it’s bad for your health to take a new job with an earlier start time (by one hour) than your current job. Because really, that’s all that’s happening. We’re* shifting business hours to be one hour earlier in spring.
Or alternatively, the claim is that it’s bad for your health to get up early. As someone who is not a morning person, I do have an inclination to be sympathetic to this claim, but I know enough people who are morning people that it strikes me as not at all likely to be true when applied across society as a whole.
*Well, you are. I live in a jurisdiction that doesn’t do biannual time changes.
But this is actually true, so I don’t see why this is a problem.
Taken to an extreme, this describes switching to the graveyard shift (8 hours instead of 1 in this case). And there are known health consequences observed with it (both short term and long term effects).
That’s not to say there may be individuals who handle it fine or that the consequences are relatively small and won’t be observed for several decades, but that’s not far off from finding a lifetime smoker who lived to 100. Not to say that a one-hour time shift is equivalent to a pack a day habit, but it’s the sort of thing where medical research exists but people still fall back on individual anecdotes and preferences rather than medical experts.
No, we can’t all work the same times or expect new jobs to cater to that, but that’s different from saying there are no health consequences, either. It’s saying that we balance the risks and rewards and decide the rewards outweigh the risks.
Shift work schedule swings are both far more dramatic, and far more frequent. One hour twice a year is not comparable to 4 hours every week.
Also, these arguments are being used to support the claim that permanent DST would be harmful. That is equivalent to saying that working all your life at a 7:30-4 job is harmful to your health relative to a 8:30-5 job.
If the desire is to have more daylight later in the day there is another aspect of this to consider. The Earth rotates on an axis that creates a diagonal of Sun movement. Sunset is much sooner in the day in NYC vs Miami.
Except health consequences are noted even in people who work solely night shifts for 10 years or more - no frequent changes in schedule necessary to affect health. It’s not just schedule swings but the fact that human health really is tied to daylight hours for whatever reason. Which is what some professionals do claim - they are also against permanent DST as you note for this reason.
As for ‘more dramatic’ and ‘more frequent’, fine. Compare a person who smokes 5 cigarettes a day vs 2 packs.
Again, not that the situations are identical, but that’s not an argument for saying it’s not a problem at all - just an argument that the degree to which it is a problem is not that serious. And then it becomes a subjective question - how serious a problem is “too” serious, rather than the objective question of whether or not it has an impact at all?