Aside, whatever political party calls for ending the time changes and switching to permanent DST gets my vote. My kids are positively feral for the week after a time change.
On the solstice in Saskatoon (where they do permanent DST), sunrise occurs at around 9:15am. That's the extreme case, but the point is there is a province that's doing this. Hopefully somebody is comparing Saskatchewan's winter commutes to its neighbors.
I will absolutely vote for ending time changes but never for permanent DST.
One, it will mean getting too early for school. Children already get up too early for effective learning and now we'll ask them to get up even earlier year-round, plus they'll have to go to school in the dark in winter.
Second, I do find it hard to get up at 7am in the summer, i.e. 6am astronomical time. Businesses would probably not switch to a 10am starting time, so it's best we keep 9am being 9am, rather than 8am.
Third, it will mean more people going to work in the dark in winter, increasing road accidents.
You can probably find many more arguments against permanent DST. Of the several nations that do not observe DST, none are on permanent DST. Russia used to be on permanent DST when they abolished it in 2011, but they moved clocks back in 2014 and they've remained there ever since. A strong motivating factor was that people had to get up too early, when it was still dark [0].
It seems to be easier to simply observe astronomical time, to which our traditional business and school schedules were set, with specific businesses starting earlier per their needs, than to observe permanent DST.
Deciding what time school starts is completely orthogonal to deciding what to call that time.
Shifting the schedule of everything by an hour twice a year is unnecessarily disruptive. If you want school to start later (which I totally support BTW) the right answer is not to abolish DST but to lobby your school board to change the school schedule.
Saskatchewan in Canada operates on permanent DST. I'm not sure if Arizona uses DST or vanilla time. Saskatchewan is significant because it's cities are at pretty high latitude and therefore it any of the flaws of permanent DST would strongly apply to them.
They don't seem in a rush to change.
Edit: on the solstice, sunrise is just before 9am in Regina.
Nearly made progress a few years ago, but a few MPs filibustered (apparently you can do that in the UK too) and screwed it up for the rest of us. Idiots.
DST more closely follows when most people are actually awake. Also if it means there are more months when you get some daylight after work. With GMT there are more days of the year where you never see the sun (unless you are lucky and have a nice office.)
Usually when the idea of using GMT as clock time everywhere is brought up, someone posts this article arguing against it, and it seems to get a positive response:
I do not find that article very persuasive. It compares the ease in the current system of knowing if it is a good time to call your Uncle in Melbourne to the purported difficulty of doing so if we have a single worldwide timezone, but I think it greatly overstates the difficulty.
In fact, you use exactly the same procedure in both systems. It's just that a couple of the values are interpreted differently.
0. In both systems you have to know that Melbourne is about N hours ahead of you due to the longitude difference.
1. Let C1 = your clock time.
2. Let C2 = C1 + N
3. Is it a good time to receive calls AT YOUR LOCATION when your clock time is C2?
4. If yes, call your Uncle.
In the multi-zone system, C2 is the current clock time at your Uncle's location. Clock time approximates local time in this system, so you need to figure out if that local time is a good time to call. In step #3 you take advantage of your knowledge that schedules in local time are approximately the same in Melbourne as they are in most other cities, including yours, so you can use your experience with your local time.
In the single worldwide zone system, it still works. C1 is now the clock time at both your place and your Uncle's place (and everywhere else). C2 is now approximately the clock time when your local time will be what your Uncle's local time is right now. In other words C1 at your Uncle's place is like C2 at your place.
There are good arguments for keeping time zones, but ease of figuring out if calling someone far east or west of you is going to wake them up is not one of them.
Judging by his username, I think parent poster is British, in which case GMT would be astronomical time for his location. Please stop posting that link, DST has nothing to do with timezones, and explaining why we need timezones is counterproductive to the issue at hand - abolishing DST.
Which would mean it would be dark when school starts. It's hard enough to get them out the door on time as is. I fully support getting rid of the time change, but not by making DST permanent.
I don't know about kids, but I'd prefer to enjoy the precious few moments of sunlight after work, rather than catch a glimpse of it on the way to work and then waste away the sunlight hours in an office.
A lot of people are borderline incapable of waking up in the dark and functioning normally throughout the day. There are a lot of physiological triggers sunlight exposure in the morning does to naturally wake most people up, and deviating from those can be quite unhealthy.
Artificial lighting, white not yellow, and lots of it, can help with that.
Anecdotally, when I moved my clothes into the guest room and got ready for the day with all the lights on instead of getting dressed by nightlight, I was much more wakeful. Also made fewer errors with navy/black socks :)
In Australia, Philips sell an LED bulb call SceneSwitch[1] (formerly Choose Scenes), which alternate between cool and warm white when switched off and back on. I've installed in all but the bedrooms.
That was sort of the parent's point: the sun is down for everyone leaving work in the winter. Moreover, it's surely been down for almost all of us for at least an hour, so an extra hour wouldn't really help.
For me, it's dark by 5:30pm from about mid October (even with daylight savings) to the end of February. It's way more than two weeks.
And that's if you get out of work at 5 every day. Lots of us get out later (say, 6 or 6:30) and then have at least a half hour commute.
The only time I see the sun in winter is in the morning. With daylight savings in effect I lose that too. Those extra few weeks they tacked onto daylight savings at the end of October are dark and brutal.
If you start school later then households where all parents are employed and the children are not old enough to handle getting ready and out the door in the morning on their own might need to have their work schedule pushed back.
If work schedules in general then get pushed back to accommodate the school schedule change, pretty much everything else follows because work is such a big and inflexible block of time on most people's schedules nearly everything else has to schedule around it.
I took the bus to school, on my own, since day two of primary school. It wasn't hard, and I don't recall anyone ever getting lost. Even if they had, it's not the end of the world; they'll find their way back eventually.
It's a peculiar American-ism to assume that children are incapable of handling themselves, and one that's been repeatedly proven false.
You know that, and I know that, but god protect you from the busybodies and CPS if you treat your children like they arent completely incompetent and made out of glass.
Nowadays, that kind of "negligence" will get your children taken away and land you in jail.
That and other related/similar societal changes have me scared of having children. I would get locked up for spanking my kids' butt or letting them play outside or something like that.
Recently a dad in BC let his kids take transit by themselves (after a lengthy period of testing before letting them journey on their own), he was banned from letting his kids take the bus.
I did not say anything about children getting lost on the way to school. I said "getting ready and out the door in the morning", which generally just concerns activities that take place in the home.
Children are not simply small humans, differing from adults only in size. There are significant cognitive differences between very young children and adult humans. They are not fully developed cognitively until the early 20s.
In particular, young children are not good at time management, balancing current actions against future consequences, anticipating and planning for how things could go wrong, and setting priorities.
Don't extrapolate the safety of the neighborhoods you lived in to the safety of all neighborhoods. There are some in my city that I don't feel safe walking alone in as an adult.
it's only even somewhat recent america. in the 70s and 80s I walked to school or rode the bus, as did the hundreds/thousands of other kids in the district. no doubt some kids were personally drive, or carpooled with other families, but it was a rarity. the parking lots simply couldn't have accommodated dozens/hundreds of car dropoffs/pickups, and it didn't happen. i don't quite know when this started...
Only the western half of Saskatchewan is on permanent DST, and that'd be the eastern bit of the Mountain time zone. Ask people in Grand Prairie, Alberta if they'd like to be in the same time as Saskatchewan and they'd think you were nuts.
For many years (decades even) starting during childhood or adolescence, I used to wake up exactly 4 hours after falling asleep. One moment I was sleeping soundly, the moment right after I was wide awake. It was so precise that I used to look at the clock, subtract 4 hours, and know exactly the time I managed to fall asleep the night before.
It was not stressful at all. I would get up, go to the bathroom, drink some water. Maybe read a book, a manga, study an algorithm, or write something. It was a very peaceful time of the day—rather, the night—to do something with a clear mind; no noise or other people around. I was not sleepy nor groggy and I could choose when to go to sleep again. But I knew I should not drag that time forever, because I still needed to get around 4 hours of sleep before finally getting up in the morning, or I would have a miserable day.
I never thought much about it, until reading about 'biphasal' sleep and how people of times past used to sleep like that.
These days my sleep is more troubled than in my teens and twenties and I have a tighter sleep schedule—probably because I've always been a night owl and I don't have anybody nagging me about going to bed early, so I don't. Somewhere along the way, I lost the habit of biphasal sleep.
I cannot say whether it's correlation or causation (let alone which way), but I used to sleep much better during my biphasal sleep years.
Hmm, had no idea long sleep is also linked to developing more diseases. Also makes one wonder in what way the causal effect (if any?) works, i.e. do those people tend to sleep more because of the diseases or is it the other way around?
That’s because the chart is simply misleading: they collected information on how long the participants slept, and then put the „probability of developing diseases“ next to it.
That’s a fallacy, because most people are in the 7 to 9 hour range, thus the overall probability is lower. The other ranges are usually people with non-nominal lifestyles, which can also very likely impact disease probability.
You can’t just turn around a graph like a mathematical equation... unless it’s sensationalism.
There's also the issue of longer sleepers likely //needing// it for some reason (I hypothesize to fight off a disease).
The sound of the study is retrospective (looking back) instead of controlled; so they probably didn't do anything to account for if someone was already healthy or sick before enforcing a sleep duration.
I can offer only the anecdotal, though I'm sure an internet search should produce for you more scientific backing.
I've experienced this myself and have witnessed it in coworkers and in my father, all of us having worked the different shifts at one point or another. For me, whenever I was on 2nd or 3rd shift my health, state of mind, and life in general suffered. I also never felt rested or clear-headed no matter how much or how little sleep I got.
Should you live near a school with an 8am marching band out in practice, or maybe you live in or near an apartment complex with a yard service peaceably armed with a lawnmower and leaf blower at 9am, then good luck to you. Setting up the equivalent of a photographic dark room gets me only so far.
Nowadays I avoid shift work as much as possible. The money isn't worth it for me.
I can give one concrete example of where it definitely is causal.
There was a short BBC documentary series about sleep a few years ago, and one of the episodes focused on a man who slept for ten hours a day and still felt drowsy and without energy. After going through a sleep clinic with all kinds of tests, the conclusion was that he should try to sleep only six hours.
The basic issue was that because he spent ten hours a day in bed, trying to catch up on what he thought was a lack of sleeping causing his tiredness, his body never got tired enough to enter deep sleep. Because he missed his deep sleep cycles, his sleep did not recover his energy properly. So this was a vicious cycle.
After a few weeks of forcing himself to wake up after six hours of sleep his problems were basically solved.
So the thing to remember is that duration of sleep tells you nothing about the quality of sleep.
EDIT: While we're here, I've had a lot of sleeping problems in the past, so here some other tips that I remember from this series, and from my sister who studied chronobiology (the science of internal clocks in biological systems, including sleep cycles):
- Note emphasized enough by this article: the deep sleep cycle is necessary for cleaning your brain from neurodegenerating toxins[0]. Getting that stage three deep sleep is essential for your mental health!
- Don't use alcohol to induce sleepiness: yes, it makes you fall asleep faster, but it also prevents you from the deep sleep. You end up not being refreshed afterwards.
- Train your brain to associate your bed with sleeping. If you can't sleep, leave the bed, do something that's not so stimulating that it keeps you awake like reading a book (avoid that mobile phone at all cost) until you feel sleepy enough to go back. This article singles out teenagers here, which is ridiculous: adults are just as guilty of doing this to themselves.
- Because of the previous point, make sure you don't use your laptop/phone in bed, nor have a TV in the bedroom.
- The reason warm baths can help with falling sleep: a fast drop from a high core temperature to a low temperature triggers drowsiness. So what the bath does is heath you up until you are warm. If you then leave that bath and enter a cold bed that needs to be warmed up this triggers a sleep response. Hot milk probably gives a similar trigger, but I'm sure about that one.
- Fasting can help with jet lag. Specifically: don't eat for at least sixteen hours (drinking water is fine), then eat your first meal at breakfast (tangent: "break fast"). This resets the body clock.
This, so much. I went through a very similar experience - having tried spending longer and longer in bed in frustration at my insomnia, I did a course[1] that measured how much of that time I was actually asleep, then restricted my time in bed to that amount and no more. Having trained my body to sleep when in bed, I could then extend it slightly week by week, until I found the optimum I need (7.5 hours).
This is why it's common advice that if you cannot sleep, get out of bed. Go clean the house or do some light exercise until you feel tired, and then try again.
I can usually fall asleep fine, but will often wake up early and can't get back to sleep. If it's anytime after 5am, I just get up and start my day.
Fasting for jet lag: if you fast, then eat, digestion makes you tired. I read the exact same advice but with eating at dinner time of the destination. Doing so has helped me to get over jet large jet lag in a few days.
This is very interesting as the story sounds a lot like what I deal with. I have done the sleep apnea testing but that didn't show anything. It might be time to find a sleep clinic :)
Also good advice for improving quality of sleep, but it is a different kind of tiredness (or lack thereof).
The fact that there are multiple kinds of exhaustion, and that we might not distinguish them, can in itself be part of the problem, since you can end up trying to fix the wrong thing.
I'm afraid you didn't quite catch that. The article says "both short sleepers and long sleepers are more likely to have a range of diseases", and that's also how I read that elsewhere. There is no claim that long sleep was a cause of disease. The opposite seems, to me at least, more likely.
I'd be interested in seeing a study about how having many timezones in a region affects sleep. For example in the US there are activities that are geared towards the west coast that keeps the east coast up later. Some that come to mind are sports. Between NFL games, UFC events and esports matches I have stayed up many nights for two or three hours later than someone on the west coast would have to for the same purposes.
Europe is also interesting, but the other way around.
Most of mainland Europe is on the Central European Timezone (UTC+1), despite the difference in solar time between western Spain and eastern Poland being about 2 hours. Solar time wise western spain should be at ~UTC-0:40, and eastern poland at ~UTC+1:30
Why couldn't you just watch it the next day? I haven't watch "live TV" in years, get all my content from the internet, it actually feels weird that in 2017people still let events and TV programs dictate their schedules.
Watching a live event during it's original broadcast provides a shared experience with others who also watched at the time. If your friends or family are watching, they may discuss the event with you as it happens. The results will be available in multiple mediums after the event. It is often not as entertaining to watch a sporting event when you already know what happened.
For TV shows, some of the same things apply. If your friends and co-workers watch the show the night of, they may talk about it all day. In that case you either find out what happened, or spend the day avoiding contact with other people who watched it already.
Shared experience provides a lot of value for some people, so apparently it's worth the costs for them.
Edit to add: recording TV broadcasts requires some amount of technical ability and expense beyond that to receive a live broadcast. Sporting events often don't have a hard end time, which can confuse some recording software. Usually if a game takes extra time, the end is more exciting.
1. For unimportant regular season games, the reason is that there are new games the next day. The league goes on. It doesn’t make much sense to watch yesterday’s match.
2. For important postseason games, the experience is communal. I’m either watching with friends or virtually watching with them via group chat. And we’re commenting on literally every play as they happen. It’s a big deal if my live stream is seconds behind theirs.
3. Such postseason games are imbued with urgency, anticipation, and excitement. A serious fan derives a lot of pleasure from the immediacy this requires. It’s nothing like deciding when to watch an episode of Bojack Horseman. When the St. Louis Cardinals are in the postseason, for example, the entire city reflects it. It’s a moment in time, a cultural event. The whole town is talking about it. You can’t decide you’d rather have that experience next month when your schedule is less busy. It’s not up to you.
It can only be experienced real-time.
On the original comment: none of this has anything to do with time zones. Even without time zones, there would be a “time” difference because of the geographical differences. A good “time” to watch on one coast is likely to be a bad one on the other, just because most human beings like to sleep when it’s dark where they are.
If you have the discipline not to peek at the scores...
My neighbour watches soccer from his home country at odd hours of the night, going to work a couple of hours later. Says he'd otherwise only watch a replay knowing his team had won and then it takes away the suspense.
His wife makes him sleep in the guest room!
I'm not sure of the details but there was something recently saying knowing the ending, I think it was focused on movies, actually leads to greater enjoyment (or possibly excitement). It was surprising to me, I go a long way to avoid spoilers -- I'd imagine the same would happen with sports matches.
I don't generally watch sport, nor follow a team, but when I do it's good sport whether I know the result or not.
Some people like to know there's 'twist' ending and the thrill is figuring out who did it. I avoided spoilers for Blade Runner 2049; Harrison Ford was in it and if you've seen the first movie that's all you need know!
I remember as a kid, you had to listen to the radio or watch TV at a certain specific time if you wanted to know what happened in the world. It's weird to think about it now, how radio and tv stations had so much power over people schedules and lives.
Gosh I wish I could sleep like I used to when I was a teenager. I constantly wake up throughout the night. Can't sleep in if I wanted to. Probably get 6 hours of sleep a night if you subtract wakeful interruptions.
Not sure why. I'm not overweight at all, 10% body fat. Exercise every day for at least half an hour, usually more, running, weightlifting, sports. Work isn't stressful. I don't get it.
Small noises will wake me up instantly, I have to have a fan or white noise filling the room to sleep soundly. Also if you haven't already try to make your room pitch black, tape any leds on electronics and get blackout curtains.
Hmm, I wonder if small noises is it. The upstairs neighbors had a kid a few years back. He's loud. During the day, though. I don't often find myself waking up to the kid's noise -- I just find myself waking up. Maybe I'm waking up to the kid and just don't realize it. Hmm.
Same expereience when you sleep in a different location (like a hotel)? I assume you are not sleeping in the same location as you did when you were a teenager.
Anecdote from my experience; having a cup of decaf tea with a spoonful of unfiltered honey leads to some of my most restful nights of sleep. My tea of choice is chamomile. My other, debatably healthy crutch is a fan which manages a cool temp while providing a constant noise.
That morning/evening chart at the end is kind of worthless in how vague it is. I mean, it's very low-resolution approximation of a normal distribution, without telling me anything about what it means to be a morning or evening person, or what distinguishes "moderate" from "extreme".
The yoga teacher baffled me the most, only taking 4 hours or so of sleep a night. I really can't imagine that working for me, 7.5 - 8 hours just seems to hit the sweet spot.
The brain needs sleep more than the body. If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. Of course, different people are wired differently but as a rule of thumb it appplies.
Slightly off topic (i.e., it's about the brain and not sleep) but the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is a personal fave.
I'm not sure how you'd measure it for this example. But I can tell you "Your Brain at Work" explains how and why thinking (as abstract as that sounds here) is a finite resource.
I stopped setting an alarm most times of the week and sleep for 10h every day (2-12).
After over a month I noticed that I would wake up earlier. I wake up after 7-9 hours and feel rather refreshed. Most of the time I still sleep 10h because I staying in bed so much.
Very similar. If I try to force a sleep schedule I'm just miserable. If I drop alarms I sleep for 10 hours for a while before getting a natural 8 hour sleep cycle back.
That being said, I loathe those days I sleep 10 hours. Hell, I'm super jealous of people that can function on 6 hours. Every hour spent sleeping is an hour of life I miss out on. I really hope in our lifetimes we can engineer something to dramatically reduce the need for sleep.
My father is a retired ER doctor and had worked pretty much every shift imaginable -- or for you, probably that you're experiencing as well despite whatever speciality you're after. He agrees.
I've found the free Sleep Cycle[0] app to be very useful visualizing my sleep patterns, plus it lets you set a 30' window (free version; perhaps other options in the paid version) for waking at a near-waking point naturally.
To avoid confusion for anyone in the US reading the linked article, the parts of the US that observe Daylight saving time will change in a week (November 5), not tomorrow (October 29).
China lacks DST, and I swear the sun is out at 4AM in the summer. I guess the problem is that the time zone is already biased so that the sun is out at 6:30ish even in the winter, it just rises earlier in the summer. And that’s just for Beijing of course, the whole country is under one giant time zone.
It also neglects to mention the entirely different lifestyle in Spain, different attitude towards work, not to mention the siesta, which one would think worth noting in a sleep related article :)
Siestas are pretty much only taken by old people and kids, even in Spain. Multiple polls have shown the average working-age adult never or rarely takes one.
You're not kidding. Way back when, my younger sister went through a phase of waking me up at 4am to play right around that age. Saw some of my first sunrises out of it, but I'm glad it stopped happening.
There's nothing more depressive to me then waking up in the morning and it's both cold and pitch dark outside. So, unlike so many people in this thread, I happen to like the DST.
