Dubai: If you’re planning to speak to some relatives in the west anytime soon, prepare yourself for some grumpy conversation. But it’s okay — you didn’t do anything wrong. Rather, the crankiness would be a direct result of Daylight Saving Time (DST), where clocks will move forward an hour to compensate more daylight in the summer months.
And while this may mean more hours of daylight, it doesn’t necessarily translate into happier people.
“There are some negatives caused by the loss of an hour of sleep at the beginning of the DST period but these exist only for a day or a few days,” Dr. David Prereau told Gulf News. “The benefits on the other hand last the entire DST period of several months.”
Dr. Prereau has been a staunch defender of pushing clocks forward and his voice is a well-respected one in the academic community. Along with giving talks on BBC, CNN and other networks, he authored Saving the Daylight, a culmination of his years of research.
Although it was first used in 1908 by the Canadian city of Thunder Bay, DST was largely adapted a hundred years ago, in April 1916, during the First World War. The benefit back then was to allow farmers more time to spend in their fields, while factory workers could produce more arms using less gaslight and electricity.
Infographic: Daylight Savings Time at a glance
Dr Prereau even goes so far as to say that DST has generally been found to save energy, reduce traffic accidents, increase public health by getting more people outdoors, as well as reducing outdoor crime.
“Daylight Saving Time generally has been found to be a beneficial practice in many countries,” he told Gulf News. “It increases the quality of life for most people by giving them an hour of sunlight at a time when it is more usable to them.”
But not every one agrees.
A recent study on life satisfaction during the transition period after pushing the clocks forward in the UK and Germany showed that individuals experienced a deterioration in pleasure the first week after the shift. In fact, the researchers attributed this negative effect to the reduction in time and the process of adjusting to the disruption in daily rhythms.
Another study by Dr. Yvonne Harrison at John Moores University in Liverpool, England, concluded that although a one-hour shift in the sleep cycle seems insignificant, it can affect sleep patterns for up to one week. According to Dr. Harrison, even the benefit of gaining an hour’s sleep when the clocks go back in autumn, is far-fetched, and she suggests that sleep patterns even then are disrupted for another week.
So what would happen if the clocks just stayed the same — as they do in the UAE and in most regions other than the western Europe and North America?
Academics at the University of Cambridge found that an extra daily hour of sunlight during the winter could save £485 million (Dh2.6 billion) in the United Kingdom alone. Elizabeth Garnsey, the researcher behind the study, anticipated that Britain’s energy production was being wasted in the winter months.
“This is because it tends to get light in the mornings before most people are awake for quite a large part of the [British time] period,” she said. “Whereas everybody is up and about in the early evenings.”
But of the 141 countries who have used the DST system at least once over the past century, only 70 hang on to the twice-yearly ritual of moving time forward in the spring and back in the autumn.
In 1996, the European Union agreed the time shift there would take place on the last Sunday’s of March and October respectively. Other nations move their clocks on their own schedules, with some beginning the process as early as last Sunday.
According to Facebook data from 2014, Americans are significantly sleepier on the Monday after Daylight Saving Time starts.
When it’s sleepy-time, hormones like melatonin ramp up to trigger drowsiness. Your body is generally set to release more melatonin when it’s dark out - which is why researchers say we should be careful about how much light from phones and computers we expose ourselves to around bedtime. And when it gets light, your body primes you to wake up by dialling down that chemical cocktail.
“Remember, we have clocks in every organ in our body,” Robert Thomas, the director of a sleep medicine fellowship at Harvard told The New York Times. “You’re not just moving sleep, you’re moving your entire body. It’s like a giant ocean liner. A big ocean liner slowly chugging away. You can’t just jerk it around.”
— With inputs from agencies
The writer is an intern at Gulf News.
