Adjusting the clocks to account for daylight saving time is an absurd practice that makes no sense in modern day.
If you’ve been living under a rock and aren’t sure what “daylight saving” means, it refers to the biannual practice of moving the clocks backward or forward by an hour. In relevant regions, which includes the majority of Canada, they are moved forward in March and backward in November.
It should go without saying that this system is absolutely ridiculous.
Perhaps most obviously, adjusting the clocks by an hour overnight is terrible for maintaining a consistent sleep pattern. When the clock is moved forward by an hour in March, one hour’s worth of sleep is essentially “skipped” overnight, meaning someone whose clock wakes them up at 9 a.m. would feel as though it were 8 a.m.
Losing an hour of sleep isn’t even the worst part, though — it’s the subsequent days where you need to adjust to the newly shifted schedule while your body is still trying to operate on its set internal clock.
Someone who normally falls asleep at 11 p.m. before the time change in March would need to start going to bed at the new 11 p.m., which would still feel like 10 p.m. due to the bodily schedule that’s been set up for months, making it potentially harder to fall asleep as it still feels too early to go to bed.
The effects that daylight saving changes have on the body is similar to that of jet lag, which refers to the struggles a traveller might have after arriving in a new time zone. Essentially, enforcing daylight saving time as a societal norm is equivalent to imposing a minor case of jet lag on the entire population twice a year for no apparent reason.
But why do we use daylight saving time anyway?
While the idea had been proposed years earlier, the practice of adjusting the clocks became formally recognized by various governments during the First World War. The German government implemented the system first in 1915, hoping to encourage its citizens to use less energy on lighting their homes as more of the day would be filled with sunshine. Nearly every other country involved in the war would eventually follow Germany’s example.
After the war ended, the Canadian government stopped using daylight saving time, and all was well — that is, until the system went back into use year-round during the Second World War years later, and we’ve never looked back.
In case you hadn’t noticed, though, Canada is not currently directly engaged in any sort of global-scale conflict, which begs the question: why are we still screwing up everyone’s sleep schedules twice a year with daylight saving time?
Daylight saving time might have made sense in wartime, but there’s no need for it in modern day. If the intent is still to save energy, this may very well be futile. Critics argue that energy will be consumed regardless of a time change, saying that air conditioners and TVs continue our overall energy consumption into the dark hours of the evening, and we consume more gas by driving around as we enjoy that extra hour.
Well, that’s just great. We’ve maintained a society-wide policy that universally ruins sleep schedules and our built-in circadian rhythms, and worst of all, the energy we consume throughout all hours of the day outweighs the need to maintain such a system in the first place.
I propose that we pick one system of measuring the time of day — whether that’s the one used from March to November, or the one used from November to March — and stick with it throughout the entire year. Or we could split the difference by going a half-hour in-between and simply use that instead.
Either way, there’s got to be a better system than the one we have set up now. Some parts of Canada have actually already figured this out, with Yukon, most of Saskatchewan and parts of British Columbia, Nunavut, Ontario and Quebec opting out of the daylight saving time system.
Believe it or not, they seem to be doing just fine without arbitrarily changing their clocks twice a year, so it’s unclear why the rest of us are forced to continue enduring the entirely preventable frustrations of consistent clock changes. If anything, sticking with one consistent time system would be easier for society to manage as it would prevent people from forgetting an impending time change and waking up late for school or work.
Changing the clocks for daylight saving time is a silly practice that does more harm than good. The best time to abolish it would have been immediately after the Second World War, but the second-best time is right now — no matter what the clock might say.