By Sumayya
VANCOUVER – As residents in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario get ready to go through their very first winter season without moving their clocks back, sleep experts are warning that switching to permanent daylight saving time could create far more trouble than citizens expect.
This shift takes place after years of public anger regarding the twice-a-year clock changes, which have been blamed for causing problems like broken sleep patterns, more car accidents, and even heart attacks.
In British Columbia, 93 percent of the public voted to stop changing the clocks back in 2019.
However, medical researchers say there is a major issue with this choice. “We picked the incorrect path to follow,” stated Wendy Hall, a retired professor from the University of British Columbia’s School of Nursing. “We should not have selected permanent daylight saving time.”
Hall and other scientists state that the research facts are obvious: keeping standard time forever, rather than daylight saving time, is actually the healthier option. That choice would mean turning the clocks back by one hour for a final time during the autumn season, and then keeping those settings forever.
Yet, researchers believe that the public’s desire to have an extra hour of light in the summer evenings and more sunshine in the late afternoons during the middle of winter won the argument. This desire, along with the politicians’ goal to make voters happy, beat out the repeated advice of health experts.
Hall is one of several sleep scientists who argue that staying on standard time forever matches up much better with the human body’s natural internal rhythms that manage when we sleep and when we wake up.
Ralph Mistlberger, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University who helped write a recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, agrees with this view.
“It all comes down to the internal body clocks that manage our rest. That mechanism is what allows us to fall asleep easily when night arrives and wake up easily when morning comes. For the same reason, it makes it harder to nap during the day and harder to stay awake all through the night. These internal tracking systems are very powerful,” Mistlberger explained.
The importance of morning sunshine
Staying on daylight time forever moves the time of sunrise one hour later on the clock. This means many citizens will lose the little bit of morning sunlight they usually get during the winter season when they are traveling to school or their jobs.
In certain areas of British Columbia, the sun will not rise until around 9 o’clock in the morning during the darkest months of the year.
While that might sound great to individuals who prefer extra light after finishing work, Hall warns that it can slow down the body’s natural creation of melatonin, which is the hormone that helps people get ready for sleep.
The result of this delay can be a bad mismatch between a person’s internal body clock and the actual timing demands of their work and school routines. Scientists call this problem “social jet lag.”
“When our internal body clock is pushed later, it means we are less sharp and alert, and we are likely more short on sleep when we have to wake up,” Mistlberger stated.
Over a long period of time, he warns that individuals who do not get enough rest and are out of sync with their internal body clocks can end up facing long-lasting health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Exhausted teenagers face the biggest dangers
Experts state that dark mornings will make life even tougher for teenagers who frequently already have a hard time getting out of bed for school.
“They tend to operate more as night owls,” Mistlberger said [health]. “That trait can be partly caused by biology, and it is something that changes back once a person reaches their early 20s. But all through the teenage years, their natural schedule gets later and later.”
A lack of sleep can harm more than just a teenager’s school grades, he added, because it can also damage their moods and the choices they make.
Furthermore, dark mornings could cause safety problems for young children walking to their classrooms and for regular travelers driving before the sun rises.
What steps can individuals take?
Scientists state that there are real, practical actions people can take to assist their bodies with this change.
Mistlberger advises getting plenty of bright light during the morning hours and lowering your exposure to bright lights in the evening.
He mentions that special light boxes, which are commonly used to treat seasonal winter sadness, can give a helpful dose of bright artificial light for individuals who must wake up before the sun rises. When evening arrives, he advises using warmer, dimmer lamps.
Classrooms and business offices could also put in smart-lighting equipment, Mistlberger said, to offer brighter light early in the daytime.
Moving forward, Mistlberger states it is time to make a change that data has already proven would help teenagers, which is starting school later in the morning. “At the very least, we can balance out some of the bad effects by moving the start of school one hour later,” he stated.
Will this change last?
Mistlberger says he is curious to observe how the public handles the shift over time, noting that for certain individuals, it will cause no trouble at all. “If you normally do not get out of bed until after the sun rises, even on the day with the latest sunrise of the whole year, you will not even notice a difference.”
However, Hall does not believe that British Columbia will keep permanent daylight saving time for very long.
“I think it might continue for a single year, and then the politicians are going to have to rethink it,” she stated. “People will become very, very angry about the bad effects this choice is having on their teenagers and children.”
