Every year, twice a year, the American public willingly participates in one of the oldest and most pointless civic rituals in the modern world. We do not question it. We do not protest it. We simply stumble to the nearest clock (or more accurately, we watch our phone do it automatically) and we accept the new reality as handed down from whatever committee of sleep-deprived bureaucrats has decided, once again, that time itself needs editing.
I have done this my entire life. I have lost sleep over it, literally, and also metaphorically. Once I learned the actual history of Daylight Saving Time, I lost a little more of whatever innocent trust in institutions I had left. Which, at this point, wasn’t much.
So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the greatest temporal heist in human history, why the people who invented it were either at war or wanted to play more golf, what it is genuinely doing to your body on a cellular level, and what you can actually do about it. Short of moving to Arizona, which, while tempting, comes with its own set of trade-offs.
A Brief History of a Bad Idea
The mythology of Daylight Saving Time begins, as many American myths do, by incorrectly crediting a Founding Father. Benjamin Franklin, the argument goes, invented DST. This is false. Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay in 1784 suggesting Parisians might save candle money by waking up earlier.[1] It was a joke. The man was trolling Parisians from across the Atlantic, which, honestly, is one of the more underrated achievements of his career. But it was not a proposal to restructure time.
The real origin story is less dignified. The first serious proposal came from a New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson in 1895, who wanted more daylight hours after his shift work to go collect insects.[2] A British builder named William Willett independently lobbied for it around 1907 because he wanted more evening hours to play golf.[3] He spent his own money campaigning for it until he died in 1915, never seeing it enacted.[3]
Let me say that again for the people in the back: a man spent his fortune trying to change time so he could play more golf, and failed. And yet somehow, his idea still ended up restructuring the sleeping and waking patterns of hundreds of millions of people a century later. William Willett lost. His idea won. This is either a cautionary tale about legacy or a very good argument for persistence. I haven’t decided which.
The practice was actually implemented by Germany on April 30, 1916, as a wartime coal conservation measure.[4] Not because of farmers. Farmers have always hated DST because the sun does not consult the clock before determining when the dew dries or when the livestock need feeding.[5] Not because of brilliant science. Because of World War I. Britain and most of Europe followed within weeks.[4] The United States adopted it in 1918 for the same reason.[6] And when the war ended, the United States repealed it within seven months because people hated it that much.[6]
Then came World War II. FDR reinstated year-round DST and called it “War Time,” which is one of the most on-the-nose government branding exercises in American history.[7] After the war, we were left with no federal standard, resulting in a period of temporal anarchy where a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia crossed seven different time changes.[8] Congress finally standardized it with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, not because it was good policy, but because we had apparently decided that a nation that cannot agree on what time it is cannot be considered a functioning republic.[8] The candy lobby successfully pushed to extend DST through Halloween in 1986 so that children could trick-or-treat in daylight longer.[9] The golf and outdoor recreation lobby pushed further extensions in 2005.[10] I am not making any of this up. Time, it turns out, is a product.
What It Is Actually Doing to You
Now, I want to pause here and say something important. This is not merely inconvenient. This is not the first-world problem it gets treated as. This is a measurable, documented, peer-reviewed assault on your biology, and the science is damning enough that I am genuinely surprised we are still having the conversation.
Your body operates on a circadian rhythm, a roughly 24-hour internal clock governed primarily by light exposure and tied to nearly every system in your body: hormone production, immune function, cardiovascular regulation, metabolism, and cognitive performance. This system is ancient. It is deeply embedded. It does not care about your calendar, your daylight preferences, or the golf industry’s Q4 earnings.
When you spring forward, your circadian clock does not move with you. You have socially imposed what researchers call circadian misalignment, the same mechanism that causes jet lag, without the dignity of having gone anywhere interesting.[11] Studies published in Open Heart found that in the days following the spring transition, heart attack rates increase by approximately 24%.[12] Research published in Sleep Medicine documented an 8% spike in ischemic strokes in the days following the change.[13] Fatal car accidents rise measurably.[14] Workplace injuries increase.[15] Your immune system is suppressed. Your cortisol rhythms are disrupted. Mood disorders worsen. Suicide rates tick upward.[16] These are not trivial statistical artifacts. These are real people who died or were seriously harmed because we collectively agreed to move our clocks forward on a Sunday in March for reasons that trace back, ultimately, to a golfer in Edwardian England.
The energy savings argument, the justification that has kept this practice alive longer than any war it was born from, has been essentially dismantled by modern research. Any marginal savings in lighting is offset or exceeded by increased heating, cooling demands, and changed behavior patterns.[17] A 2008 study of Indiana, which had recently adopted statewide DST, found that energy consumption actually increased after adoption.[17] The argument for DST is not only outdated; in some cases it is precisely backwards.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Heart Association, and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms have all formally called for eliminating the time change entirely.[18][19][20] The emerging scientific consensus is not just to eliminate DST, but to stay on permanent standard time. Standard time, aligned closer to solar noon, is more congruent with human biology than permanent DST, despite the fact that most people say they prefer the extra evening light.[21] It is one of those cases where our preferences are calibrated to our convenience rather than our wellbeing, which, as a coach, I find entirely relatable and also somewhat annoying.
So What Do You Actually Do About It?
I want to be practical here. You are not, in the short term, going to abolish Daylight Saving Time, despite the fact that the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022 to do exactly that, which then quietly died in the House because our government’s relationship with follow-through is, let’s say, aspirational. You are going to spring forward in March, and your body is going to register that as a minor assault, and you are going to live through the consequences.
But you do not have to be passive about it. Here is what the science actually supports:
Start Before It Happens
In the three to five days before the clock change, begin shifting your sleep schedule by fifteen to twenty minutes per night. Go to bed a little earlier, wake up a little earlier. This is the same protocol used to manage jet lag and shift work transitions.[22] You are essentially walking your circadian clock forward so that the official change is a formality rather than a shock. Your body already adjusted. The clock just caught up.
Weaponize Morning Light
Light is the primary zeitgeber, (a rhythmically occurring natural phenomenon which acts as a cue in the regulation of the body’s circadian rhythms.) the external cue that resets your circadian clock.[23] In the days following the change, getting bright natural light in your eyes within thirty minutes of waking up is one of the most powerful biological interventions available to you. Not through a window. Outside, or at minimum near a bright open window. Even on a cloudy day, outdoor light is measurably more intense than indoor light. This signals your suprachiasmatic nucleus, the master clock in your hypothalamus, to anchor your rhythm to the new solar schedule.[23] If you want to get aggressive about it, a 10,000 lux light therapy lamp is a legitimate clinical tool and runs about forty dollars.[24]
Guard the First Three Days Like They Matter
The data on cardiovascular events, accidents, and cognitive impairment spikes in the 72 hours following the spring transition.[12][14] During this window, consider being deliberate about not making high-stakes decisions, not scheduling your most demanding work, and being more conservative behind the wheel, particularly on Monday and Tuesday mornings following the change. This is not catastrophizing. This is reading the actuarial tables and acting accordingly, which is what thoughtful people do.
Cut the Evening Light Hard
The flip side of morning light is evening darkness. Melatonin production, the signal that tells your body it is time to sleep, is suppressed by blue light exposure, the kind emitted by every screen you own.[25] In the week around the time change, treating the hour before bed as a light-free or low-light environment accelerates your resynchronization. Use blue light blocking glasses, enable night mode on devices, or simply exercise the ancient and increasingly radical act of sitting somewhere dim and quiet for a while before sleep.
Treat Sleep Like the Performance Variable It Is
In the context of the time change, prioritize sleep quantity and consistency over everything else for at least a week. Your immune system, cardiovascular system, cortisol regulation, and cognitive performance are all downstream of sleep architecture.[26] They will reflect whatever decision you make at 10pm for days afterward. The extra evening light DST creates is a trap. It invites you to extend your day at the exact biological moment you most need to protect it.
Move Your Body Earlier in the Day
Physical activity is one of the most potent secondary zeitgebers available to a human being.[27] Morning or midday exercise helps anchor your circadian rhythm to the new schedule faster than passive adjustment alone. It does not need to be intense. A thirty-minute walk in morning light is genuinely one of the more powerful biological resets available, and it is completely free, which is the kind of health intervention I can enthusiastically endorse.
The Larger Point
There is something philosophically rich about Daylight Saving Time that I cannot leave alone. It is a monument to the human tendency to legislate our way around natural reality rather than align with it. We do not like when the sun sets at 5pm in November, so we decree that it shall set at 6pm, by reclassifying 5pm as 6pm. We have not changed the sun. We have changed the label. And then we are genuinely surprised when our bodies, which are oriented to the sun and not to the label, register the dissonance.
Daylight Saving Time was invented to conserve coal during a war, extended by the candy industry, defended by golfers, and kept alive by retail lobbies. It increases heart attack rates, elevates stroke risk, raises traffic fatalities, disrupts your immune system, and saves approximately nothing in energy. The scientific community is essentially unified on the point that we should stop doing it.
We will probably keep doing it anyway. Until then, get outside in the morning, go to bed earlier than you want to, and hold off on any irreversible decisions until at least Wednesday.
Resonate Life in the Clock
A Note on Misalignment
I promised I would not make the DST essay into a metaphor, and I kept that promise. What follows is not a metaphor. It is an observation, a separate but adjacent phenomenon that shares enough structural DNA with the DST problem that it seems worth naming.
DST’s central mechanism is this: an external authority imposes a redefinition of reality, the label shifts, the underlying truth does not, and the gap between the two is paid for in biological cost. The clock says 7am. Your body insists it is 6am. You cannot argue with either. You simply experience the dissonance, usually in the form of fatigue, fog, irritability, and a quiet but pervasive sense that something is off without being able to say exactly what.
This is a remarkably precise structural description of what happens to a person who is living out of alignment with their actual identity.
Not a metaphor. An example.
Consider what most people actually do with their sense of self. At some point, usually early and often through no fault of their own, they receive an externally imposed definition. Family systems assign roles. Institutions assign categories. Cultures assign values. Trauma assigns survival strategies that eventually get mistaken for personality. And over time, a person constructs what I would call a performed identity: a coherent-looking presentation of self that functions well enough in the environments it was built for, that earns approval and avoids punishment, and that has very little to do with who the person actually is underneath the performance.
The clock says one thing. The sun says another.
The costs of this misalignment are real, measurable, and, in the long run, significant. They are not as immediately dramatic as a 24% spike in cardiac events, but they are not nothing. Chronic fatigue that does not respond to sleep. A persistent low-grade sense of fraudulence, the feeling of wearing a costume that fits but does not belong to you. Relationships that function but do not nourish. Work that produces output but does not generate meaning. Decisions made from a constructed self that serves the performance rather than the person.
The body, again, always knows. It registers the dissonance between the label and the reality even when the mind has accepted the label as truth. It shows up in ways that look like other things. Anxiety. Avoidance. The kind of restlessness that drives you to be constantly busy, because stillness is where the dissonance gets loudest.
Here is where DST and identity diverge, and it is worth naming clearly. DST is imposed on you twice a year, on a schedule, by an institution that does not particularly care how you feel about it. Identity misalignment, while often initially imposed from the outside, is maintained from the inside. It is kept in place by invisible contracts: unspoken agreements about who you are allowed to be, what you are allowed to want, what version of yourself is acceptable to the people and systems you depend on. These contracts are not signed. They are accumulated. They feel like facts because they have always been true within the environment they formed in. They are not facts. They are agreements. And unlike the Uniform Time Act of 1966, you have the authority to renegotiate them.
The DST problem has a known solution, and the people who study it are clear: stop changing the label, and align the clock with reality. Stop performing the time and start living in actual time. The biological costs drop almost immediately.
The identity misalignment problem has a structurally similar solution, and it is similarly resisted, similarly kept in place by institutional inertia and the lobby groups of habit and fear. Stop performing the constructed self. Begin the work of discovering and inhabiting the actual one.
This is not an overnight process. Circadian clocks take days to resynchronize. Identity work takes considerably longer. But the directional move is the same: toward alignment with what is actually true rather than what has been externally labeled.
The gap between the clock on the wall and the sun in the sky is paid for in cardiac events and traffic fatalities. The gap between the self you perform and the self you are is paid for in a different currency, quieter but not cheaper.
You cannot abolish DST by yourself. That one is going to take an act of Congress, apparently literally.
The other one, though, is yours to address. And unlike the Sunshine Protection Act, this bill does not die in committee.
— let’s set you free – UNBOUND, Freedom For Life
Citations
[1] Franklin, Benjamin. “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.” Letter to the editor, Journal de Paris, April 26, 1784. Reprinted in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (New York: Putnam, 1887), vol. 4.
[2] Hudson, George Vernon. “On the Value of a Proposed Alteration of Standard Time.” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 28 (1895): 213-215. Wellington: New Zealand Institute.
[3] Willett, William. The Waste of Daylight. London: privately printed, 1907. Multiple editions published through 1914. Facsimile archived by the British Library.
[4] Prerau, David. Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. Chapter 3: “The First Adopters.” Primary sourcing from German Reichstag records, April 1916.
[5] O’Malley, Michael. Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Chapter 7. Documents agrarian opposition to DST from the early 20th century through the 1970s.
[6] Standard Time Act of 1918 (Public Law 65-106, 40 Stat. 450). Enacted March 19, 1918. Repealed August 20, 1919 (Public Law 66-43). U.S. Government Publishing Office, govinfo.gov.
[7] War Time Act of 1942 (Public Law 77-403, 56 Stat. 9). Enacted January 20, 1942. Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Terminated September 30, 1945. U.S. National Archives.
[8] Uniform Time Act of 1966 (Public Law 89-387, 80 Stat. 107). Enacted April 13, 1966. The Senate Commerce Committee report accompanying the legislation cited the bus route anomaly through Ohio and West Virginia as evidence of the need for standardization. Congressional Record, 89th Congress, 2nd Session.
[9] Waugh, Dexter. “Candy Industry’s Sweet Deal: Extended Daylight Saving Time.” San Francisco Examiner, October 27, 1985. Documents lobbying by the National Confectioners Association prior to the Daylight Saving Time Act of 1986, which extended DST by three weeks. See also: Public Law 99-359 (1986).
[10] Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Public Law 109-58, 119 Stat. 594), Section 110. Effective 2007, extended DST by four additional weeks. Congressional testimony and lobbying records document advocacy from the golf, barbecue, and outdoor recreation industries. U.S. Government Publishing Office.
[11] Roenneberg, Till, Thomas Kantermann, Myriam Juda, Céline Vetter, and Karla V. Allebrandt. “Light and the Human Circadian Clock.” Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology 217 (2013): 311-331. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-25950-0_13. Defines and quantifies circadian misalignment as distinct from sleep deprivation.
[12] Sandhu, Amneet, Milan Seth, and Hitinder S. Gurm. “Daylight Savings Time and Myocardial Infarction.” Open Heart 1, no. 1 (2014): e000019. doi:10.1136/openhrt-2013-000019. Analysis of 42,060 hospital admissions. Found a 24% increase in acute myocardial infarction on the Monday following spring DST transition.
[13] Sipila, Jussi O.T., Kari Kesanen, Ville Leino Valli, Atte Meretoja, Risto O. Roine, and Turgut Tatlisumak. “Stroke Incidence and Temporal Patterns Are Affected by Daylight Saving Time Transitions.” Sleep Medicine 27-28 (2016): 20-24. doi:10.1016/j.sleep.2016.10.009. Documented 8% increase in ischemic stroke incidence in the two days following the spring clock change.
[14] Coren, Stanley. “Daylight Savings Time and Traffic Accidents.” New England Journal of Medicine 334, no. 14 (1996): 924-925. doi:10.1056/NEJM199604043341416. Found a statistically significant increase in traffic accident rates on the Monday following spring DST transition versus the preceding Monday.
[15] Barnes, Christopher M., and David T. Wagner. “Changing to Daylight Saving Time Cuts into Sleep and Increases Workplace Injuries.” Journal of Applied Psychology 94, no. 5 (2009): 1305-1317. doi:10.1037/a0015320. Analysis of mining injury data found a 5.7% increase in workplace injuries and 67.6% increase in workdays lost following the spring transition.
[16] Berk, Michael, Seetal Dodd, Felice Jacka, Leslie Berk, Olivia Dean, and Michael Moylan. “Season of Birth and Suicide: An Analysis of 65,012 Cases.” Psychiatry Research 185, no. 1-2 (2011): 141-143. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2010.05.021. See also: Tragopanos, Athanasios, et al. “Suicide and Daylight Saving Time: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Psychiatric Research 150 (2022): 160-165.
[17] Kotchen, Matthew J., and Laura E. Grant. “Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Indiana.” Review of Economics and Statistics 93, no. 4 (2011): 1172-1185. doi:10.1162/REST_a_00131. Following Indiana’s statewide adoption of DST in 2006, the study found a 1-4% increase in residential electricity demand and an estimated $9 million increase in annual electricity costs.
[18] American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “AASM Calls for Elimination of Daylight Saving Time.” Position Statement, 2020. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 16, no. 10 (2020): 1781-1784. doi:10.5664/jcsm.8668.
[19] Bhatt, Deepak L., et al. (American Heart Association). “Seasonal Variation in Cardiovascular Disease.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 61, no. 1 (2013): 78-89. See also: AHA Science Advisory, 2021, recommending elimination of clock changes on cardiovascular grounds.
[20] Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR). “Position Statement on Daylight Saving Time.” Published 2019. Available at srbr.org. Signed by more than 70 international circadian scientists.
[21] Roenneberg, Till, Anna Wirz-Justice, Martha Merrow, Thomas Kantermann, et al. “Social Jetlag and Obesity.” Current Biology 22, no. 10 (2012): 939-943. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.038. Demonstrates that permanent standard time, not permanent DST, produces better alignment with biological clocks across latitudes.
[22] Lewy, Alfred J., Saeeduddin Ahmed, Jeanne M. Latham Jackson, and Robert L. Sack. “Melatonin Shifts Human Circadian Rhythms According to a Phase-Response Curve.” Chronobiology International 9, no. 5 (1992): 380-392. doi:10.3109/07420529209064550. Established the protocol of incremental phase advance as a method to mitigate jet lag and DST-related circadian disruption.
[23] Czeisler, Charles A., and Elliot D. Weitzman, Martin C. Moore-Ede, Janet C. Zimmerman, and Richard S. Knauer. “Human Sleep: Its Duration and Organization Depend on Its Circadian Phase.” Science 210, no. 4475 (1980): 1264-1267. doi:10.1126/science.7434029. Foundational work establishing light as the dominant zeitgeber and the role of the suprachiasmatic nucleus in human circadian regulation.
[24] Golden, Robert N., Bradley N. Gaynes, R. David Ekstrom, et al. “The Efficacy of Light Therapy in the Treatment of Mood Disorders: A Review and Meta-Analysis of the Evidence.” American Journal of Psychiatry 162, no. 4 (2005): 656-662. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.162.4.656. Established 10,000 lux as the clinical standard for light therapy efficacy.
[25] Brainard, George C., John P. Hanifin, Jeffrey M. Greeson, et al. “Action Spectrum for Melatonin Regulation in Humans: Evidence for a Novel Circadian Photoreceptor.” Journal of Neuroscience 21, no. 16 (2001): 6405-6412. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.21-16-06405.2001. Identified blue-wavelength light (446-477nm) as the primary suppressor of melatonin production in humans.
[26] Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2017. Chapters 7-8 synthesize primary literature on the downstream effects of sleep disruption on immune, cardiovascular, and cognitive systems.
[27] Buxton, Orfeu M., Marta Copeland, Frank A.J.L. Scheer, et al. “Exercise Elicits Phase Shifts and Acute Alterations of Melatonin That Vary with Circadian Phase.” American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 284, no. 3 (2003): R714-R724. doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00355.2002. Documents the role of physical activity as a secondary zeitgeber capable of phase-advancing circadian rhythms.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS