Those looking forward to getting an extra hour of sleep next week could be in for a rude awakening.
Americans in states that follow daylight saving time will set their clocks back another hour on Sunday, spurring sleep experts to again question whether the energy-saving benefits of the biannual time change are worth the cost to public and personal health.
Modern daylight saving time, adopted by the U.S. in 1966 under the Uniform Time Act, is observed to conserve energy, prevent traffic accidents and injuries, and reduce crime, according to the Department of Transportation, which is in charge of daylight saving time. Some studies have cast doubt on whether changing the clocks actually saves energy, with some arguing it leads to greater power use.
Still, sleep experts say the consequences of losing sleep outweigh the reported benefits of daylight saving.
“There’s really no reason we should continue to do this back and forth,” Erin Flynn-Evans, a consultant to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s Public Safety Committee, told NBC on Monday. “The negative health consequences and the negative effect on multi-vehicular crashes in the spring are just not worth it.”
A study of 732,000 accidents over two decades last year found that losing an hour each spring because of daylight saving time is associated with a 6 percent increase in fatal car crashes.
The AASM in a statement last year said the U.S. should replace daylight saving time with a year-round standard time, writing that daylight saving time can cause a “misalignment between the biological clock and the environmental clock, resulting in significant health and public safety-related consequences.”
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Experts blast Daylight Saving Time https://t.co/E4CcZdyzhE pic.twitter.com/2dpmf3kFu4
— The Hill (@thehill) November 1, 2021
Allegedly, changing time was supposed to benefit farmers, but I doubt it has. About all these two changes a year do for me is mess up my sleep pattern.
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