Story at a glance
- Sleep experts say daylight saving time poses serious risks to public safety and mental health.
- The American Academy of Sleep Medicine last year said the U.S. should eliminate daylight saving time for good.
- Sleep has been shown to improve cognitive functions like decision making and problem solving.
Americans in states that follow daylight saving time will set their clocks back another hour on Sunday, spurring sleep experts to again question whether the energy-saving benefits of the biannual time change are worth the cost to public and personal health.
Modern daylight saving time, adopted by the U.S. in 1966 under the Uniform Time Act, is observed to conserve energy, prevent traffic accidents and injuries, and reduce crime, according to the Department of Transportation, which is in charge of daylight saving time. Some studies have cast doubt on whether changing the clocks actually saves energy, with some arguing it leads to greater power use.
Still, sleep experts say the consequences of losing sleep outweigh the reported benefits of daylight saving.
“There’s really no reason we should continue to do this back and forth,” Erin Flynn-Evans, a consultant to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s Public Safety Committee, told NBC on Monday. “The negative health consequences and the negative effect on multi-vehicular crashes in the spring are just not worth it.”
A study of 732,000 accidents over two decades last year found that losing an hour each spring because of daylight saving time is associated with a 6 percent increase in fatal car crashes.
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The AASM in a statement last year said the U.S. should replace daylight saving time with a year-round standard time, writing that daylight saving time can cause a “misalignment between the biological clock and the environmental clock, resulting in significant health and public safety-related consequences.”
Daylight saving time’s threat to public safety is particularly salient in the days immediately after each time change, the organization added, and sleep has been shown to improve cognitive functions like decision making.
“Individuals who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to take risks because they perceive less consequence,” Judith Owens, co-director of the pediatric sleep program at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School, told NBC. “For example, a child in elementary school darts out into the road because they are more impulsive and less vigilant.”
The U.S. has taken up and later scrapped daylight saving time twice before. Once in 1918 and again from 1942 to 1945, when it was used to conserve energy resources during wartime. Individual states may opt out of daylight saving time, as long as the entire state does so. Arizona and Hawaii are currently the only states that don’t observe daylight saving.
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