Is year-round daylight saving time a good idea? Maybe not.
If you were yawning more than usual thanks to the recent switch to daylight saving time, you weren’t alone. It takes some people a full week to recover from feeling more sluggish than usual after rolling back the clock for daylight saving time.
“It really messes people up,” said Steve Kay of biological sciences at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Kay, USC Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences and director of the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, is considered one of the preeminent experts in circadian rhythm.
“It affects human performance. The data has been clear in terms of traffic accidents, and there’s also data that it’s not great in terms of cardiovascular health: Heart attacks go up.”
In California, daylight saving time could become year-round after voters in November approved Proposition 7, provided federal law is changed to allow the move.
Some proponents of the proposition brought up the health concerns, such as upticks in traffic accidents and heart attacks, but USC experts say they’re missing the mark. Permanent daylight saving time wouldn’t solve this issue; instead, it would prolong it — adding more days of sluggish recovery to the year.
There’s a long-held understanding that experiencing light when you first get up is good for you, said Travis Longcore of biological sciences and spatial sciences at USC Dornsife, who researches night lighting.
If we could shift our work and school schedules to accommodate the time change we would be fine, he said, but we don’t. That “summer schedule,” during which most of us wake up before the sun, could have real health implications if done long term.