Ele Ludemann: #%@%&*#! daylight #@%&*#saving

%#@*&%#! daylight %#&*@ saving starts too early and ends too late.

We’re only seven days past the spring equinox which means day and night are more or less of equal length.

That in turn means that the hour of extra light in the evening means an extra hour of dark in the morning.

We’ve been waking at around 6am with the sun rising by 6:15. Today it will be dark at that time and we won’t be seeing the sun until 7:15.

If there has to be a time change, a few weeks later would make a big difference to daylight hours.

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It’s also still more winter than spring in North Otago so an extra hour of light in the evening isn’t conducive to enjoying the outdoors.


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It will be worse still further south where they’re also dealing with record rainfall while lambing and calving.

When daylight saving was introduced it started at Labour weekend by which time there was about 14 hours of daylight and temperatures were warming.

That meant waking up to the sun and temperatures were getting high enough to make outdoors activities more inviting.

Then people began thinking if some daylight saving was good, more would be better without working out just a few weeks makes a bid difference to the amount of daylight there is.

Sigh.

So here we are losing an hour too soon so we’re waking up in the dark, upsetting our circadian and risking heart attacks:

There’s really clear research out there that shows that missing out on sleep by an hour or more can lead to poorer functioning the next day,” says Dr Karyn O’Keefe, from the Sleep/Wake Research Centre.

That one-hour shift can make it harder to get to sleep, and hence harder to wake up, she explains. So it impacts different aspects of functioning like sleepiness, but also mood, reaction time, motivation, concentration and decision making.

Daylight saving, Dr O’Keeffe says, causes what’s called “circadian disruption”.

“Everyone has a body clock in the brain that needs to be synchronised to the sun in order to stay healthy and function well. And of course, when we move our body our bodies to have a different sun time suddenly the internal clock in our brains is not synchronised anymore and that disruption also causes problems.”

The combo of this with that poor quality of sleep feels a bit like jetlag (without the joy of a holiday).

“Suddenly we’ve made this one-hour shift… which seems like it’s really small but it’s enough to cause some problems.” . . .

I wonder if there’s research on the impact on productivity and accidents in the days after the clocks leap forward?

It’s not such a problem on Sunday, but on Monday morning we might feel robbed of that extra hour when getting up to start the working week.

“We’re still thinking that we should be waking an hour later with the old body clock time.”

“So we can be frustrated in the evening or at night and tired and groggy in the morning and have short sleep as well. It’s like this combination of feeling really groggy and grotty for, um for a couple of days at least.” . . .

Frustrated, groggy and grotty – oh yes.

And what does the time change do to our health?

“One of the outcomes that we see sometimes with daylight saving transitions is that people who’ve are vulnerable to heart problems can have those problems exacerbated. So there is a little bit of research out there to show that daylight saving transitions can lead to a higher risk of having a heart event of some kind.” . .

All that downside when it’s too soon to get much benefit.

Sigh – %#@*! daylight #@&*% saving sucks.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.