As soon as the U.S. Senate passed a surprise bill declaring that daylight saving time would be in operation all year, lobbyists for early birds leapt into action, hoping to kill the bill in the House.
We’re bracing ourselves for the op-eds.
Many sleep scientists argue that following standard time is the best and safest option for public health. It’s more closely aligned with the sun’s progression and far better for our built-in circadian rhythms, they say, claiming that seeing light when we wake up in the morning is better for our emergence from sleep and thus more conducive to our health.
Plus if we have more time for evening activities, there’s more time to hurt ourselves.
In the other corner, fans of year-round daylight saving time point to the benefits of longer evenings, the conservation of energy and allowing kids more time to kick a ball around before it gets dark. They also note that crimes of all kinds tend to flourish in the dark, so the longer it’s light, the safer many people feel.
The same goes for driving. And plenty of business interests prefer daylight saving time, too, offering as it does more time and incentive to be out and about, socializing and spending money. Plus, there’s the psychological factor: dark evenings are depressing calling cards of winter. Especially in cold cities like Chicago. They bring pain to the soul.
Like most else in life, it’s a trade-off. How you feel depends on where you put your focus. We’ll leave the choice to the people’s representatives, and we’re no sleep professionals. But from our urban perch on the eastern boundary of Central Time, the choice of daylight saving time works better for us.
Chicago winters are tough. An extra hour of light in the evening will be an improvement to our collective mental health and will make our streets safer, and maybe that walk home from the train a couple of degrees warmer. Even in January, dawn still should be underway here by about 7 a.m. Most Chicago kids won’t have to walk to school in the dark.
But whatever side you fall on, let’s agree right now to get rid of the changing of the clocks, a disruptive ritual that has been proven to cause accidents, create stress over missed appointments and lead to all kinds of domestic panic. In the digital era, added traumas come from not knowing which clocks automatically adjust and which stay rooted to the past in their timekeeping.
Let’s stop “losing” an hour’s sleep every year and let’s end the fall ritual of putting the clocks back, about as depressing a harbinger of winter as humans ever created.
Especially in this town.
