Twice a year, people rely on their bodies to readjust to a time policy that many are starting to view as perhaps unnecessary and outdated — daylight saving time.
“When you change clocks to daylight saving time, you don’t change anything related to sun time,” lead researcher Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich said to ABC News. “This is one of those human arrogances — that we can do whatever we want as long as we are disciplined. We forget that there is a biological clock that is as old as living organisms, a clock that cannot be fooled. The pure social change of time cannot fool the clock.”
Daylight saving time began in 1918 when President Woodrow Wilson introduced it to support the war effort during World War I. Since then, states and localities have been given the freedom to choose to observe the time change or not, sometimes causing confusion and disorientation.
“I think it’s kind of inconvenient and random,” junior Kaylee Eubank said. “We all have electricity, so why keep doing it?”
Arizona and Hawaii do not observe daylight saving time. Eubank, native to Arizona, said she was surprised that people still observed the tradition.
“I honestly didn’t even know people still used it,” Eubank said. “In Arizona, I thought it was just a thing of the past that people didn’t do anymore. But when I came here, I was surprised that people still did it. I don’t think it’s that necessary because we never used it in Arizona and I don’t notice that big of a difference.”
Despite popular belief that daylight saving time was meant to give farmers more daylight to work, the truth about its origins and purpose has little to do with working in the fields and more about the economic factor of conserving electricity.
“Nowadays, its ostensible purpose is to save energy: one more hour of sunlight in the evening means one less hour of consumption of artificial lighting,” The Atlantic said. “In 2005, President George W. Bush lengthened daylight saving time by a month as part of a sweeping energy bill signed that year, citing the need to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil.”
According to Quartz, Indiana’s years in which they observed daylight saving time did not changed the state’s electrical demands, which proves the opposite as being true.
“We find that the overall DST effect on electricity consumption runs counter to conventional wisdom: DST results in a 1 percent overall increase in residential electricity demand, and the effect is highly statistically significant,” researchers said.
According to Slate, daylight saving time could also lead to multiple negative health effects due to disrupted sleep patterns, including increased heart attacks and decrease in focus, which translate to losses in economic gain as people adjust to the time change.
“All of these impacts have economic costs too,” the article said. “The cost could be up to $434 million in the U.S. alone.”
Changing the body’s internal clock – the circadian rhythm – results in some loss of sleep on the human body, which could lead to serious health problems.
“Lack of sleep effects how your body functions,” senior nursing student Courtney Saffell said. “When you are asleep, your body repairs and restores itself. When you chronically run on lack of sleep, you are not giving your body time to heal and it can hinder your mental status and functioning. This can lead to people making mistakes and errors that aren’t normally made when hey have adequate sleep.”
The effect of daylight saving time might not communicate as much as studies are trying to prove, according to Saffell.
“Honestly, I don’t think daylight savings effects sleep patterns too much,” Saffell said. “Some people can be effected by the amount of light that is out – or lack there of – when waking up and it could throw them off for a couple days, but nothing that truly effects sleep patterns.”
People’s habits in general should to be maintained and adjusted as well.
“I know when people work odd shifts at night and throw off their circadian rhythm, it can sometimes cause weight gain and sleep insomnia,” Saffell said. “It is important for people to maintain a regular sleeping schedule so your body has time to restore itself.”
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