Stop the Harmful Time-Changing Ritual
Except for the wise people of Arizona and Hawaii, who have year-round standard time, Americans were once again forced to “spring forward” and lose an hour of sleep on Sunday morning.
This practice, known as daylight saving time, gives Americans more time in the evening to enjoy sunlight. This helps owners of golf courses, tennis courts, and other outdoor entertainment venues. Conversely, it also forces parents to drive their children to school in the dark.
With the time change, accidents increase, as do health-related issues. Losing an hour of sleep disrupts our “body clocks.” As William Shughart, II writes in the Miami Herald, daylight saving time misaligns “our human body clocks with morning sunlight, thereby disrupting circadian rhythms and causing the spikes in heart attacks, strokes, depression and other health problems observed in the days following the one-hour spring and fall time shifts.”
These negative health consequences were verified in a 2008 study conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine, which identified an increase in heart attacks in the three days following the implementation of daylight saving time.
Heart attacks are not the only way Americans are dying due to daylight saving time. In 2020, exhaustive research by professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder determined that there is a six percent increase in fatal automobile accidents in the week following the switch to daylight saving time. The researchers examined 732,000 automobile accidents over two decades and determined that the accidents caused by daylight saving time led to the loss of 28 additional lives each year. These are lives that are needlessly lost due to a tradition that has outlived its usefulness.
In 2009, a study was done by researchers at Michigan State University for........
