How Daylight Saving Time Impact Sleep & Health

This weekend you'll need to spring your clocks forward an hour.

Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday meaning you will "lose" an hour of the day. Every year it can be a struggle to adjust to that change especially when it comes to sleep. Dr. Michael Newnam is a sleep specialist with Oklahoma Heart Institute and he joined News On 6 to explain how you can prepare yourself and your family for the change.

Related Story: When Does Daylight Saving Time Start In 2024? Which States Ignore It?

Stacia: Thank you for coming in today or talk to us about some of the health risks if we don't prepare, ahead of time for this change.

Dr. Michael Newnam: Right so the fortunate thing is we're only talking about an hour. And so we're going to adapt to that change. The question is how quickly and if it's going to kind of perpetuate into maybe worsening sleep patterns. And so if it's an hour time change, then just simply making subtle adjustments over these next few days generally works very well for both adults and children. So even simply just adjusting the clock by about 15 minutes in terms of when you go to bed will help you to go ahead and adapt to that change when it hits this weekend,

Stacia: Those small increments can make a huge difference. And this is the hard one, this is where we lose an hour of sleep.

Dr. Michael Newnam: Correct. So it's it has the wonderful, you know, opportunity to have a little bit more daytime sunlight for those folks who get off work, you know, a little bit later to be able to enjoy a little bit more daylight when they come home. But yes, this is where we feel like we're a little bit hard to get up in the morning. It's really the morning time that I think we suffer.

We have this thing called sleep inertia where we just don't want to get out of bed. Because we're not ready. Because we feel like we did lose an hour.

Stacia: Absolutely and so children, my three-and-a-half-year-old, I told you this right before he came on that he told me last night, I can't go to bed yet it's still light out well, next week, that's going to be a big problem. So any advice for children?

Dr. Michael Newnam: Well, yeah, it is challenging. Unfortunately, it gets even more challenging as we get into the summer months because it really does when it goes gets dark at 9:30. It is challenging to get a child or anyone to bed at eight. And you know, when we see the same issue with adults who are perhaps shift workers and things like that getting to bed at an early time if they have to get up. It's challenging when your kind of circadian rhythm and your light cues are influenced by you know how late it's laid out.

Stacia: Yes and so, you know, maybe blackout curtains?

Dr. Michael Newnam: Absolutely. Blackout curtains can be wonderful. I think that the main important thing, to emphasize, is trying to stick to a consistent sleep schedule. And, again, the one-hour time change is not going to be traumatic at any age, but it is going to require a little bit of adaptation and a little bit of just incremental change.

But really being intentional about sleep schedules. And that's whether we're in a time change or not, that's really been the epidemic crisis for Americans and, even as we made it through COVID sleep schedules have really suffered for Americans and I would say most of the Western world because we have artificial light even when it's not light outside. And so unfortunately we're constantly distracted with electronics and we have the ability to have on-demand entertainment so bedtime sometimes suffered because of that.

Stacia: It does. Well, thank you so much for coming in today. We appreciate all of your advice, and we'll get through it. But we have to be really diligent on our sleep schedules and our sleep patterns.

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The United States will soon switch the clocks again in observance of daylight saving time, a routine that still confuses many Americans to this day.

Daylight saving time begins at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, March 10, 2024, and will last until Nov. 3, 2024, when we switch back to standard time. The time change means an "extra hour of light" in the evening but that also means slightly darker mornings.

The practice of changing the clock started over 100 years ago in the United States, but many Americans don't like it, don't understand it, or simply don't observe it.

Why Do We Change The Clocks, and When Did It Start?

Daylight saving time(DST) began as an idea to encourage fuel conservation. Some credit the proposal to 19th-century entomologist George Hudson of New Zealand who suggested it to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. Hudson thought it would help the country conserve energy, but also allow more time for his hobby of collecting insects. Others, credit Benjamin Franklin in 1794 and Englishman William Willet in 1907.

The first country to adopt daylight saving time as an energy-saving practice was Germany in 1916 followed by the United Kingdom and then the United States in 1918.

After years of unregulated variations, Congress standardized the practice in 1966 with the Uniform Time Act, which allowed states to opt out of it but not to stay on daylight saving time permanently.

Many people have been told that the U.S. adopted daylight saving time to benefit farmers, but that's not actually true. Like Germany, the U.S. adopted DST to conserve electricity during the First World War.

Almost immediately, farmers voiced their displeasure saying the idea was disruptive to their schedules. Agricultural groups led a 1919 fight to repeal DST.

All time zones in the United States that observe DST were changed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The act meant that in 2007, DST would now begin at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March instead of the first Sunday in April, moving the time from 2 to 3 a.m.

Additionally, DST would end at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November instead of the last Sunday in October, moving the time from 2 to 1 a.m.

There are a lot of questions to this day as to whether daylight saving time really works, with many studies showing the impact on energy conservation to be negligible at best.

The Congressional Research Service included the following summary in a 2018 report.

Congress has required several agencies to study the effects of changes in DST observance. In 1974, the Department of Transportaion (DOT) reported that the potential benefits to energy conservation, traffic safety, and reductions in violent crime were minimal. In 2008, the Department of Energy assessed the potential effects to national energy consumption of an extended DST, and found a reduction in total primary energy consumption of 0.02%. Other studies have examined potential health effects associated with the spring and fall transition to DST and found a cumulative effect of sleep loss and increased risk for incidence of acute myocardial infarction in specific subgroups.

See the Full Report Here

Related Story: How Daylight Saving Time Impact Sleep & Health

Which States Ignore Daylight Saving Time?

Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and most of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time.

The Arizona government passed a law in 1968 to place the state on Standard Time year-round making it the only state in the contiguous United States to do so.

While the state of Arizona does not recognize DST the Navajo Nation which is located in most of Northeast Arizona and part of Northwest New Mexico does. This means that it can be two different times in the state during certain points of the year. Confusing the matter more, the Hopi Reservation which the Navajo Nation surrounds doesn't observe DST like the rest of the state.

Meanwhile, because of the divided time zones in the state, Indiana struggled for years with Daylight Saving Time. Today, almost all of Indiana operates on Eastern Time, except for 12 counties that observe Central Time. Decades of back and forth between state and local officials led to confusion over which counties were on what time, and when they did or didn't observe DST.

However, in 2005, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law stating that the entire state of Indiana would become the 48th state to observe daylight saving time which began on April 2, 2006. The debate in Indiana persists though, with many hoping to place the state under one unified time zone.

While several other states have similarly divided time zones, Indiana has struggled the most with reconciling it with DST.

Also of note, most of Mexico no longer observes daylight saving time after it was abolished in October of 2022. However, some of Mexico's border states still observe DST including the entire state of Baja California, as well as the border municipalities in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas. These areas have been allowed to maintain the practice because of their proximity to the United States.

How Do Americans Feel About Daylight Saving Time?

According to a 2022 CBS News/YouGov survey, more Americans prefer permanent daylight saving time to permanent standard time, but not by a very high degree. Overall, 79% of those polled would prefer to just change to one time year around and stop with the switching.

Those who want more daylight in the evening rather than the morning all year round say it puts them in a better mood and they feel more productive later in the day.

Older Americans are more likely younger Americans to want daylight saving time made permanent. Like Americans overall who prefer it, older people also say it's because it puts them in a better mood, but saving energy ranks right behind that among those ages 65 and over, higher than it does for younger Americans who prefer daylight saving time.

People living in the Northeast, Midwest, and South have a preference for permanent daylight saving time. However, those in the West, home to two states that are on permanent standard time, are split in their views.

Extending daylight saving time to the whole year is favored over standard time by nearly all demographic and political groups. It's rare these days to find a bipartisan agreement on many issues, but Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all prefer permanent daylight saving time over permanent standard time.

Didn't Congress Try To Get Rid Of Daylight Savings Time?

The twice-a-year ritual has led some members of Congress to push to make daylight saving time permanent.

The Senate passed a bipartisan bill in March of 2022, named the Sunshine Protection Act, to end the back and forth. The House never acted on the measure.

Proponents said the idea would have positive effects on public health and the economy and even cut energy consumption. Researchers at the University of Washington found that year-round daylight saving would "likely prevent an estimated 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths, 2,054 human injuries, and $1.19 billion in costs each year."

There are an estimated 2.1 million deer-vehicle collisions in the U.S. each year, according to the group of researchers led by postdoctoral researcher Calum Cunningham and associate professor of quantitative wildlife sciences Laura Prugh. Those crashes are responsible for around 440 human deaths and 59,000 injuries and come with a hefty price tag of $10 billion.

Has the US Ever Paused Daylight Savings Time?

Yes. If the US makes any change, it won't be the first time it's been tried. In 1973, President Richard Nixon signed a bill into law for year-long daylight saving time amid an energy crisis. The hope was to reduce nighttime electrical use.

Instead, studies indicated that it led to an increase in kids getting hit by cars on their way to school. By the fall of 1974, the US reverted back to standard time.