On Sunday, clocks across the UK will go forward by an hour – except mine. Since October 2018, I have been living my life entirely by GMT. It may sound extreme (and inconvenient) but I do it because I believe that daylight savings time (DST) is an unnecessary bane on our society; a failed experiment long in need of terminating.
For a start, changing the clocks is bad for our health. This is because we humans (and many other lifeforms on this planet) are synchronised with Earth’s natural orbit – we naturally wake up when the day begins and sleep when night falls. Changing our “social clock” creates a gulf between the time on our watches and the height of the sun in the sky. (This was made even worse during the second world war, when British double summer time was introduced, time-shifting the natural day by two hours instead of one.) In 2019, a group of experts in psychology, neurology and sleep cycles concluded that “if we want to improve human health … we should abandon DST”, after studies showed that, in the weeks after a clock change, sleep durations fall and heart attacks increase. There is a strong safety case, too: when DST was paused as an experiment in the 1960s, road traffic accidents in England and Wales fell by 11%.
