From St. Louis Public Radio…
Love it or hate it, Daylight Saving Time began over the weekend. Across the country, people lost an hour of sleep in exchange for longer days through the summer. Is it worth it?
On one hand, traffic accidents increase for three days following the time change and people become more irritable and groggy upon losing sleep. Absenteeism and heart attacks also increase directly following the time people switch their clocks forward an hour.
“We’re changing the time on the clock, but not when the sun rises,” said Erik Herzog, a biology professor with Washington University. “We’re asking our bodies to adapt to an artificial construction.”
On the other hand, DST was created to conserve energy during the summer and provide “longer” days to enjoy the summer sun. In an encore presentation of a “St. Louis on the Air” conversation originally aired March 2016, Herzog said that one of the other original purposes of Daylight Saving Time, in early-1900s Britain, was that it incentivized people to go outside and recreate rather than go to the pubs and drink.
The only problem?
“Advancing is harder than delaying for reasons that are still not clear,” Herzog said. “It is harder for humans to get up earlier than shift and delay our schedule—flying east is harder for most people than west, when traveling across time zones.”
Is it worth it? “Because of the way we work now and the way we deliver our energy, it is clear that Daylight Saving Time is not really solving the problems it set out to solve,” Herzog said.
Read more and listen to the complete story at St. Louis Public Radio