This shift in melatonin during puberty lasts into our 20s. This extended evening light delays the brain’s release of melatonin, the hormone that promotes drowsiness, which in turn interferes with sleep and causes us to sleep less overall.īecause puberty also causes melatonin to be released later at night, meaning that teenagers have a delay in the natural signal that helps them fall asleep, adolescents are particularly susceptible to sleep problems from the extended evening light. However, exposure to light later into the evening for almost eight months during daylight saving time comes at a price. The biggest advantage of daylight saving time is that it provides an extra hour of light in the late afternoon or evening, depending on time of year, for sports, shopping or eating outside. In 2023, clocks spring forward one hour at 2 a.m. And in late 2022, Mexico adopted permanent standard time, citing benefits to health, productivity and energy savings. The American Medical Association recently called for permanent standard time. The body of evidence makes a good case for adopting permanent standard time nationwide, as I testified at a March 2022 Congressional hearing and argued in a recent position statement for the Sleep Research Society. This means that during daylight saving time, many young people get up and travel to school in pitch darkness. For instance, many children start school around 8 a.m. Morning light also boosts mood – light boxes simulating natural light are prescribed for morning use to treat seasonal affective disorder.Īlthough the exact reasons why light activates us and benefits our mood are not yet known, this may be due to light’s effects on increasing levels of cortisol, a hormone that modulates the stress response or the effect of light on the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions.Īdolescents also may be chronically sleep deprived due to school, sports and social activities. Morning light is essential for helping to set the body’s natural rhythms: It wakes us up and improves alertness. In contrast, during daylight saving time from March until November, the clock change resulting from daylight saving time causes natural light to be present one hour later in the morning and one hour later in the evening according to clock time. Standard time most closely approximates natural light, with the sun directly overhead at or near noon. However, the two time shifts – jolting as they may be – are not equal. The strong case for permanent standard timeĪmericans are split on whether they prefer permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time. It’s become clear to me and many of my colleagues that the transition to daylight saving time each spring affects health immediately after the clock change and also for the nearly eight months that Americans remain on daylight saving time. I’ve studied the pros and cons of these twice-annual rituals for more than five years as a professor of neurology and pediatrics and the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s sleep division. In contrast, the fall transition back to standard time is not associated with these health effects, as my co-authors and I noted in a 2020 commentary. Researchers are discovering that “springing ahead” each March is connected with serious negative health effects, including an uptick in heart attacks and teen sleep deprivation. And nearly two-thirds would like to eliminate them completely, compared to 21% who aren’t sure and 16% who would like to keep moving their clocks back and forth.īut the effects go beyond simple inconvenience. prepare to set their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 12, 2023, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time.Ībout one-third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these twice-yearly time changes.
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