Year-round daylight time will cause ‘permanent jet lag,’ sleep experts warn
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Of course, it is perfectly fine to prefer one time or another. But I do not find the claims of health and safety impacts very convincing, given that many places are already shifted today.
The current daylight saving time standard, where we switch time twice a year by an hour, is not meaningless in the same way because schedules are "sticky" on sub-6-month timescales; a business keeps opening at 9am both before and after the clocks change in the Fall.
And the rest of culture more or less follows that one start time.
That only holds true in all-else-being-equal situations. Or equal enough - I don't know if you can apply this to Paris and Berlin.
It seems simpler to me to enforce a specific time after sunrise that all institutions must create a break for children, office workers, etc to go outside.
[_]Other children told me they copied their parents pattern, to sleep after midnight awake before 7. I think they were copying insomnia.
Edit, downvotes: So time zone implementations from documented fascists are a perfect defence of new changes because we aren't actually willing to discuss their possible negative affects on entire nations?
I suspect there's at least some adjustment, which indeed could negate health effects even if they existed (provided the operational adjustment exactly equals their time offset). OTOH If adjustment is incomplete or there's some numerical attachment (universal preference to start at specific hours), then effects could be a possibility.
I live in Eastern Portugal, where there’s no siesta, but then again we’re on GMT here, which is better aligned to the sidereal day.
Up to a certain point, countries adapt. For example, Germany and France are in the same timezone, but their schedule is shifted. This can be easily seen when looking at the TV schedules. In Germany, evening TV starts at 20:15 (the start of movies, ...). In France it's more like 21:00. When I lived there it was 20:50, but TF1 now seems to start at 21:05.
German TV: https://www.zdf.de/live-tv
French TV: https://www.programme-tv.net/programme/chaine/programme-tf1-...
Similarly, schools and kindergardens are usually not at the same time.
This local shifting works more or less, but can't be stretched too far. Especially multinational companies have expectations that workers come in at certain times. This is the problem that Spain faces. (I couldn't easily check by how much Spanish are shifted as Spanish TV schedules don't seem to coordinated like in France or Germany).
Spain is certainly ahead by a lot, but the 2:30 is for Galicia which is the westernmost tip of Spain (which is on the same longitude as Portugal, which is in a different time Zone).
For most of Spain it’s less, tough still a lot.
Spain is shifted pretty far, but some places are even further offset. Large parts of Russia and China, but also Alaska and Argentina.
Also, since the OP concerns Canada, worth noting that the map shows Canada being more shifted than the US, which I didn’t expect.
[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-wrong-is-your-time-zone-15285708...
I'd rather have exposure to sunlight after work, when I can actually, you know, be outside and receive it, rather than be in closed spaces during practically all the sunlit hours.
As for the kids, there is strong evidence than being actually outside receiving sunlight is good for, e.g. preventing myopia. So it's also better for them to have sunlight after school so they can play in the park under the sun, than have it while they're at a closed space. Apart from the fact that they prefer it that way.
PS: I'm not from Canada, but there is a similar debate in my country, and I strongly prefer permanent DST. Actually, according to polls, a considerable majority of the population does, but they still want to set permanent non-DST time. Fortunately I have a flexible work schedule so I guess I'll just wake up at 6 instead of 7 but still, the change will have an impact on my family.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
It makes the workday morning a lot more tolerable.
They are calling on switching to Standard Time instead of Daylight Saving Time. There can be adverse long term effects of switching to DST as opposed to ST. And finally the reference to jetlag is in the context of _social jetlag_
But yes, it's meant figuratively or in the social jetlag sense.
The researchers here are pointing out the problem that if you do not see any sunlight for the first few hours you are active, that will have negative consequences for your sleep.
I see lots of anecdotal 'evidence' given in the comments that you won't see daylight in the morning anyway. But most people will get to see some daylight during their morning commute, unless they get in before 8. Yes, there will be some days where that still isn't true, around the winter solstice. But outside of the middle of the winter, the researchers point out that it is better to have some sunlight in the morning over having none at all.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
TL; DR:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
> A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time zones.
The official position of the scientists who study this sort of thing:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
The field in question:
(Edit: Mentioning schools since the article explicitly talks about children...)
Unless you wake up after 8am (which most people do not, during the week), then you already will have to wake up before sunrise in Vancouver, B.C., even without year-round daylight time.
The real health solve is for workplaces to set an adaptive clock-in time, so everyone wakes up with the sun.
International companies already have a country-dependent clock-in time; this is not much of a stretch.
In any case, our whole style of life has shifted from the mornings into the evenings, so summertime makes much more sense than having no daylight savings time at all. Summertime for the whole year is definitely my personal preference. To be fair, I live in Portugal, where wintertime for the whole year would be overall bad for the way we live and for tourism, because it means that it will be dark at 8 PM instead of 9 PM. People here mostly live in the evenings and start work at 9 AM and even later.
Or, keep adjusting for one hour twice a year. I've never had any problems or complaint about shifting time either. It is nothing, not even a nuisance. IMHO, there is no need to change something that works fine.
Sunrise tomorrow morning will be 4:57am and by the solstice - 4:45am. Sydney on DST will be a much more civilised 5:57am. That's sun shining in your window being on the East coast, it's actually getting light much earlier!
If Brisbane was permanently UTC+11 it would be on the same time as Sydney through summer (DST is 6 months of the year) and then an hour ahead for winter. The latest sunrise time in winter would then be 7:38am which is the same as Melbourne's and 1/2 hour later than Sydney. But given it's the dry season and rarely overcast, daylight will begin more like 7:00am.
Thus, we already have a timezone shifted in the wrong way, with less daylight during the morning and more in the evenings. Moving to permanent DST, would move our time even further away from the biological clocks of everyone.
(If you just look at the calendar, the period of absolute night is fairly short. But this is Norway, so even if the sun is technically above the horizon, it's probably hidden behind a mountain.)
Mediterranean latitudes have far darker nights. This is especially true with snow on the ground; at that point you can easily navigate by moonlight.
That being said, it is pretty dark. Norway has a particular type of seasonal affective disorder which doesn't strike anywhere further south, and which manifests as... well, difficulty sleeping, loss of energy, depression, lots of bad things.
It never seems to affect anyone who grew up there, but it can be an issue even for Norwegians who move northwards. As for refugees who end up placed there ... often they decide whatever they were running from was the lesser of two evils.
Singapore is effectively on year-round daylight time. Singapore is just barely north of the equator, but it's on the same timezone as Indonesia, which puts it a full hour ahead of the timezone it "should" be on, according to its solar noon. As a result, sunrise is around 7am and sunset is around 7pm every day of the year.
Somehow, this hasn't caused the country to fall into collapse, the way these quoted sleep experts make it sound.
Not really that much later. On the winter solstice, sunrise in Vancouver is around 8am, which is less than an hour after Singapore (Singapore's sunrise can be as late as 7:15am).
The southern Ontario wine region is at the same latitude as France's wine region. Scotland is at the same latitude as northern Quebec.
Compare locations on a globe.
By all means make comparisons to France and Scotland, I don't have any issues with that.
Yeah and the 'south of Canada' is at the 49th parallel more or less.
Singapore is at 1°N.
This article is not about those places. It's about British Columbia, where sunrise on the winter solstice is less than an hour later than Singapore's typical sunrise.
Maybe if they got better sleep they wouldn't draft laws that get people flogged for putting their shoes on the wrong feet or being nude in their own apartment.
TL;DR switch from "GMT+X" to "Sunrise+X" assisted by IT for most things to solve all problems.
What's Sunrise+1 in Iceland in December?
So you'll have a gradual half-hour difference between San Diego and Seattle in the summer. When it's sunrise in San Diego, it's Half Past Sunrise in Seattle. You're in Seattle, you have a phone meeting with someone in San Diego at two hours past sunrise. Uh, when is that again? Oh, and you bring in a third party from someone in SF, he's 15 minutes off to both of you.
Uhm, it will be 18:26 or so for everyone. What's the problem?
That's not insane, but it's a very, very, very hard sell. I think the closest you can get is having schools and workplaces move their starting hours by half-hour increments across the year.