It’s times like this I wish I lived in Hawaii. Or Arizona. Or American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or on the Western lands of the Navajo nation. Those are the places under U.S. jurisdiction that do not observe the manifest folly of Daylight Saving Time, and will be leaving their clocks and watches exactly as they are when the rest of us are dialing ours an hour forward on Sunday, March 9.
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The switch will happen as it always does at the decidedly unhandy time of 2 a.m., when anyone with a decent circadian sense will have long since gone to bed. It will mean that the sun comes up an hour later in the morning, leaving early risers to wake up in darkness. The sun will also hang around an hour later in the evening, contributing to an unseemly 8:30 sunset in most of the continental U.S. and the absurdity of an 11:44 p.m. sunset in Alaska on the June 21 summer solstice.
The U.S. is not exactly alone in fiddling with the time twice a year—but we’re hardly in the majority either. Roughly 60% of countries follow standard time year-round, and there is a growing American constituency for joining them. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) endorses eliminating Daylight Saving Time and staying on Standard Time year round, citing the increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, atrial fibrillation, emergency room visits, and traffic accidents when the clocks spring forward.
“The human biological clock is regulated by the timing of light and darkness, which then dictates sleep and wake rhythms,” the AASM wrote in a position statement in 2023. “In daily life, the timing of exposure to light is generally linked to the social clock. When the solar clock is misaligned with the social clock, desynchronization occurs between the internal circadian rhythm and the social clock…which has been associated with risks to physical and mental health and safety.”
According to an AASM poll of 2,000 Americans, 63% support eliminating the seasonal time jumps—though the poll did not tease out whether they prefer Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time.
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The American Medical Association agrees that Daylight Saving Time belongs on the cultural scrap heap. In 2022, the group called for the elimination of the spring-forward practice, writing, “Some studies suggest that the body clock does not adjust to Daylight Saving Time even after a few months.”
A 2020 study in PLOS Computational Biology found that Daylight Saving Time adversely affects not just the body but the mind. When the clocks spring forward, the incidence of mood disorders, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse all rise.
Studies show that adolescents and teens might be especially affected by the clock change, exhibiting attention, learning, and behavioral deficits. At school they are often sleepier and have slower reaction times.
Why do we even do this to ourselves? It’s not as if the initial justification for Daylight Saving Time still applies. Benjamin Franklin is widely credited with originating the idea of turning the clocks forward in an effort to save the public money on candles used during the evening. In a 1784 edition of the Journal de Paris, he wrote, “An immense sum! That the city of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”
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But Franklin did not in fact mention changing the clocks; he merely suggested that people should better coordinate their sleep-wake schedules with the rising and setting of the sun. What’s more, his essay was entirely satirical. A notoriously late sleeper, he feigned amazement that the sun came up at all before noon. “Your readers,” he wrote, “will be as astonished as I was when they hear of [the sun] rising so early; and especially when I assure them that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes.”
It would not be until 1918 that Daylight Saving Time would be signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, in an effort to save energy during the latter months of World War I. The public did not necessarily see the larger patriotic mission of the law.
“Daylight will last another hour, which can be used for tennis or other sports,” wrote the Washington Times.
Other newspapers weren’t so sure of what to make of the time change at all. “What became of that hour that was lost Sunday morn?” asked the Daily Gate City and Constitution-Democrat, an Iowa paper.
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Either way, history notes that the war that gave rise to the time change ended 107 years ago, and the purported energy savings are far from proven. The reverse might even be true. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that while energy demands for lighting do decrease, that difference is offset by an increase in heating and cooling. In 2007, Congress extended Daylight Saving Time, which used to run from April to October and now spans March to November—again in the name of energy conservation. Some data show it seems to help a tiny bit, cutting demand by just 0.5% per day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
That business of the 2 a.m. time for the clock change has also outlived its usefulness. The original reason was to accommodate railroads, which had few trains running at that wee hour and thus would encounter minimal scheduling snafus. But again, a lot has changed since 1918, with fewer than 1% of passengers traveling by rail in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
The actual job of making the time change is admittedly a little easier in the twenty-first century than it was in the past. The ubiquitous clocks on computers, tablets, phones, and smart watches spring forward and back by themselves at the appointed time. But alarm clocks, wall clocks, appliance clocks, and analog watches do not. More importantly, our bodies don’t either.
So thank you, Daylight Saving Time, for your century-plus of service. It’s time you took a well-earned retirement.
