Why Daylight Savings Time?

Why Daylight Savings Time?

A while back I wrote about the Georgia legislature voting to adopt Atlantic time and stop changing clocks twice a year. The state said that ending daylight savings time would improve health and safety. All the while, the president was advocating a change to doing the same by making daylight saving time permanent. A reader, Pat wrote that if a change was a’coming then it should be to make standard time permanent because it was more attuned to our body’s rhythms. Pat, it seems, is right so why Trump and the congress want to foist daylight savings time on us permanently is beyond me. 

Maybe it is because I hate daylight savings time so. It seems that when we spring forward I never get a good night’s sleep until we fall back. The president has endorsed it. The House voted it out 318-117. However, passage in the Senate is uncertain. The bill has failed once before and Tom Cotton (R-Ark) strongly opposes the change. Cotton reminds us that we tried this once before in 1974 and it failed miserably. Cotton said that the Sunshine Protection Act would “make winter a dark and dismal time” for people in his home state of Arkansas and many others across the country. “In January of 1974, millions of Americans traveled to work and school in darkness. Schoolchildren carried flashlights,” he said. “Tragically, some of these kids were struck by cars and killed while walking to school in the dark.”

Not only that, it screwed up my deer season. 

Cotton, mentioning 1974 reminds me of the old saying “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” I believe Santayana said that – or something similar. Well in this case it should be “Those who do remember the past are still doomed to repeat it” because in 1973 Congress passed a law to make daylight savings time permanent as a test. It was a test that failed miserably and proved highly unpopular mainly due to those dark winter mornings that Cotton talked about.

Cotton points out “The sun wouldn’t rise until nearly 9 o’clock during winter in Seattle,” he said. “In Grand Rapids, the sun would rise as late as 9:15 a.m., and in Williston, North Dakota, they would not see the sun ’till almost 9:45 a.m.” It was a bad idea once and it is a bad idea now. When it was tried it was quickly repealed. Why do we have to repeat that mistake again?

Cotton would keep things as they are. However, there are those who advocate that if we change at all we should change to standard time rather than daylight savings time. The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (yes there is such a thing) have called for a change to permanent standard time, arguing that more light in the morning is better for our circadian biology (thanks Pat!).

“Circadian rhythms are intrinsic 24‐hour biological cycles that govern various physiological processes. In addition to the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus, the circadian system is organized in multiple peripheral tissues, such as the brain, heart, bone, liver, and lung. Emerging evidence suggests that disruptions in these rhythms, which are regulated by a network of clock genes, play pivotal roles in human health.” The major medical and sleep science associations overwhelmingly advocate for permanent Standard Time, linking permanent Daylight Saving to increased risks of heart issues, sleep disruption, and morning traffic accidents.

Well that certainly explains why my 1974 deer season was all messed up! 

Also according to a new study at Stanford, changing clocks twice a year not only disrupts circadian rhythms it also leads to higher rates of stroke and obesity. The study finds Either permanent standard time or permanent daylight saving time would be healthier than our seasonal waffling, with permanent standard time benefitting the most people. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/09/daylight-saving-time.html

So leave it up to our politicians to choose the wrong time. I hope this move to Daylight Savings Time does not pass and if we must fix out clocks, let’s fix it on standard time. Maybe then I will have a better deer season – permanently.