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Changing the clocks and the illusion of time

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Next week, on Sunday, Nov. 6, we will once again engage in this strange ritual of moving time as we fall back, setting our timepieces an hour earlier. Time can be baffling, at least I find it so. Intrigued by the complex psychological, physiological, metaphysical, and philosophical aspects of time, I have long considered this changing of the clocks silly and disruptive. It turns out that a lot of people through history have agreed with me, so, of course, I judge them to be quite perceptive and wise. Albert Einstein said, “Time is an illusion.” Author Mario Benedetti wrote, “Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.” And science fiction writer Ray Cummings penned, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

It seems like a no-brainer to me that cavalierly changing our timepieces messes with our internal clocks. We have animal bodies, we are creatures of the Earth and Cosmos and no matter how much we attempt to manipulate our daily rhythms of sleep, body temperature, eating, and activity, Mother Nature will rule as the master clock in our brain synchronizes those rhythms with the rising and setting of the sun. German researcher Till Roenneberg says, “This is one of those human arrogances–that we can do whatever we want as long as we are disciplined. We forget that there is a biological clock that is as old as living organisms, a clock that cannot be fooled.” He explains that our internal circadian rhythm follows the sun and actually changes in four-minute intervals, exactly the time it takes for the sun to cross one line of longitude.

The practice of daylight saving time (DST: and yes, “saving” is singular) has been called self-imposed jet lag, and like the effects of crossing time zones, the body adjusts better to “gaining” time traveling westward to “losing” time when traveling eastward. Studies have shown that people adjust better to falling back, “gaining” an hour, than springing forward, “losing” an hour. Roenneberg’s research monitored people’s sleep and activity levels for eight weeks, also considering their “chronotypes” as night owls or morning larks. Both groups’ timing for sleep and peak activity adjusted easily when daylight saving time ended in the fall but never adjusted with the change in the spring, especially true for the night owls as I can personally attest.

Disruptive side effects include disorientation and sleep deprivation, which can in turn cause fatigue and hormonal changes. People often report feeling more anxious and irritable with increased emotional outbursts. Personally, I love having something outside of myself to blame for being crabby as well as a valid excuse, certified by sleep specialists, to take a nap, but I’d still rather the system would leave my rhythms alone and allow me to get crabby or sleepy on my own recognizance.

First, a brief history and some myth-busters: Daylight saving plans were neither created to benefit nor supported by farmers who actually fiercely opposed DST because they still lived with the natural rhythm of the land and the animals, with the sun dictating their schedules, which DST disrupted. They had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Cows aren’t quite as suggestible or agreeable as human beings when it comes to messing with their internal body clocks.

Benjamin Franklin has been incorrectly credited with originating the idea of moving the clocks forward. What actually happened: he was grumpy about being awakened at 6 a.m. by the summer sun, so he published a satirical essay called “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” for the Journal of Paris in 1784, which suggested that people should get up earlier, calculating that Parisians could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” So, apparently his adage, “Early to bed and early to rise” fell in the category of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Englishman William Willett spent a personal fortune evangelizing for the adoption of summer time, as it is called in Europe. Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, was the first location to use DST in 1908, and Germany the first country to enact it in 1916 to conserve electricity. England followed suit in 1916, but not before Willett had died. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson first signed it into law in 1918 as part of the war effort, to be repealed seven months later. Although advocates touted energy conservation as a benefit of DST during the world wars and periods of oil shortages, higher usage of both air conditioning and heating have offset energy savings.

The historical timeline of DST is a hodgepodge of local practices being enacted, repealed and continually tweaked in the U.S. and around the world, variously called fast time, war time, and summer time. States and local jurisdictions could do whatever they wanted to. In 1965 there were 23 different pairs of beginning and ending dates just in Iowa. St. Paul began daylight saving two weeks before Minneapolis, perhaps determined to be first in their ongoing municipal competition. Travelers on a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven time changes. It’s not hard to imagine the nightmare of scheduling confusion for trains, buses and broadcasting, in particular. Finally, in 1966 the Uniform Time Act was passed, standardizing DST from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. States still could opt to remain on standard time year-round as Hawaii, Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) and several U.S. territories have done.

The current U.S. schedule was set by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, enacted in 2007, extending the DST period to eight months, from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. Currently DST is used in over 70 countries, affecting over a billion people. Think about that: over a billion people exhibiting irritability and emotional outbursts, all at the same time. Hmmmm.

Proponents of DST argue that it saves energy, promotes health through outdoor leisure activity during summer evenings, reduces traffic accidents and crime and is good for business. Supporters tend to be urban workers, retail businesses, outdoor sports enthusiasts and businesses, tourism operators, and others who benefit from increased light during the evening in summer. Opponents argue that actual energy savings are inconclusive, that DST causes sleep deprivation, mood disorders and increased health risks such as heart attacks, and that changing clocks twice a year is expensive and disruptive, cancelling out any benefits.

You can come to your own conclusions; just remember to set your clock back next Sunday so you won’t be standing out on the church steps all by yourself.

I’ll leave you with a protest poem I wrote years ago.

Time Change – Spring 1987

They took an hour away today

one I could have used.

I needed that extra bit;

I felt a bit abused.

Who do they think they are, these folks,

to take time I hold dearly?

Someone somewhere thought it best

to take this hour yearly

and move it over somehow

from April to October

when they decide to give it back.

This isn’t sane nor sober.

These same folks cast dour looks

if you’re late to a meeting.

They’ll glance at watches sourly

in lieu of friendly greeting.

They’re the ones who always have

appointments that are set

months in advance with schedules

and deadlines to be met.

When you say how you feel time,

how it changes in your mind,

stretching out or fleeting by

or stopping, you’ll usually find

they’ll act as if you’ve lost it

even though you speak sincerely.

Yet they’ll take an hour of your life

and move it cavalierly

to where they think it ought to be

from spring into the Fall.

I think it ought to be my choice

if it moves at all.

If we must take an April* hour

then why can’t we just use it

on the day we need an hour most?

Why do they get to choose it?

Perhaps I’d like some time in May

to watch the tulips flower

or maybe June would be the time

to sail an extra hour.

I could plunk it into August

to keep summer a bit longer.

I think we need to speak out now

to make our voices stronger;

To let them know we won’t be had

by time manipulation.

We’ll use our hour as we wish

without capitulation.

*In 1987, DST began in April;

now it begins in March.