Daylight Savings Time Ends - HURRAY for Better Sleep!

Last night the clocks went back one hour heralding the end of Daylight Savings time. I say HURRAY! The idea behind Daylight Savings Time in the summer months is that we shift the number of daylight hours into the evening, so if the sun normally sets at 7 pm, with Daylight Saving Time, it will set at 8pm instead. Supposedly this will mean we will spend less time with the lights on in our homes at night thus saving electricity. Studies have been done to evaluate the savings and they have come up empty. Daylight Savings Time also means that you’re less likely to sleep through the daylight hours in the morning, since daylight will arrive earlier as well. That can mean daylight can arrive as early as 4:15am in my area of the U.S. interrupting important melatonin production. It has been well studied by sleep experts that Daylight Savings Time has a negative effect on the human body and results in more accidents and deaths each year when we spring forward and lose an hour of sleep. The U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration analyzed 21 years of fatal crash data and found a small, but significant, increase in road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring. The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the spring-forward Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday. And it seems it’s not just car accidents. Evidence has also shown an increase in incidences of workplace injuries, heart attacks, and strokes in the days after we spring forward. When we shift clocks forward one hour in the spring, many of us will lose that hour of sleep. In the days after daylight saving time starts, our biological clocks are a bit off. It’s like the whole country gets jet lag, and although an hour may not sound like a big change, human beings are very sensitive animals and small disruptions in our sleep patterns can alter our health, including hormones, insulin, adrenaline, and brain function. When our biological clocks are off, everything about us can be out of sync. Personally, it takes me several weeks to acclimate to the new time change, but I experience almost no acclimation to falling back out of Daylight Savings Time. In fact I feel an innate sense of restoration when we fall back. So I welcome the end to Daylight Savings Time and the return to normal time, and I hope that one day the rest of the United States will follow Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands which are the U.S. territories that do not participate in Daylight Savings Time. 

-YouTips4U