Screwing Up the Time Zone
Apologies for the silence, excepting the usual regular posts. No excuses; I just plead life (ie. too much to do) getting in the way. But onward to today’s topic …
So today is one of the two days a year, when we bugger up our time zone – something I’ve written about before in 2008, 2009 and 2012 and probably elsewhere.
Yes, last night the UK switched to British Summer Time and put the clocks forward an hour.
Why? For no good reason that I can understand, and contrary to a lot of scientific research.
Basically what this change does is to mirror the effect of jet lag from flying east. And we know this is much more disruptive than flying west.
But it’s more than that. The disruptions to our circadian cycle can be profound, and possibly last for weeks. This should be worrying when nationally and globally we appear to be more sleep short, and with worse quality sleep, compared with pre-Covid (see, inter alia, here).
There’s a recent short article in The Conversation which summarises much of the evidence on the effects on our circadian cycle. The conclusion is:
These findings suggest the spring transition can have a ripple effect that lasts for weeks. It also suggests we are more finely tuned to the natural world than we might think.
Spring DST may seem like a simple one-hour shift, but for many, it’s much more than that.
We don’t need to keep changing the clocks. We’re not (yet) at war – which is where the clock change originated – and we have much of the technology to manage our working environments; extending, if necessary, to changing the hours we do work.
This whole charade is daft on just so many levels – see my earlier posts.
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