Things to know about sleep as the clocks go back
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
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.
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.
From about nine on, I used to beg to be allowed to sit in the car and read instead of getting dragged along through stores.
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/mobile/dad-told-children-too-young-to-r...
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.
Also, wake up lights.
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 :)
1. https://www.philips.com.au/c-m-li/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch
The standard tech schedule of ten to seven is insane IMO. Construction workers have it figured out, they work seven to three.
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.
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.
Newly appointed NDP premier in BC last week just brought it up again.
While I don't agree with current party in power, I would vote for them if they did actually remove the annual time change.
Personally I don't care when the sun comes up, and same for most people I know. I begin any day between 5AM-830 AM randomly.
I sleep with blackout curtains, the sun is not a factor with my sleep really.
I am sure waking kids while it's dark out is rough, but they will adapt...
This already happens in the winter months when sunrise may not occur before ~7:45AM in BC
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.
They don't seem in a rush to change.
Edit: on the solstice, sunrise is just before 9am in Regina.
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.
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.
PS. articles like this describe me to a T, dunno if it has anything to do with it: https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flus...
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.
Although exercising is never a bad idea anyway.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know if I wake up and I can't fall asleep right away, I'll just have to do something for 90minutes and it will come again. It's stress free.
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.
You happen to create blurry charts ;-)
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.
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.
How could you possibly measure these values?
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.
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.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube....
or
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id32...