I want my hour of sleep back

Winston Churchill reportedly argued that it enlarges “the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people who live in this country”.

I say hogwash. But then again, I’m from Saskatchewan, one of the few sensible places in Canada.

What on earth am I talking about, you might ask? Daylight Saving Time (DST) of course - the ridiculous practice of springing our clocks forward in March, then falling back in November and generally wrecking havoc with circadian rhythms.

But in our world of global business and industry, it is hard to imagine that DST will ever stop unless all countries agree on this. In 2006 Canada even moved up our implementation of DST by 3 weeks in order to line up with our biggest trading partner, the U.S.

What’s always bugged me about discussion of DST is that people say things like “we get an extra hour of sunlight, so it’s not so bad.” There is no magical extra hour of sunlight that suddenly appears. You could have got up an hour earlier and enjoyed that same hour.

Or they say, “you get to pick up that hour of sleep you lost when the clocks roll back in the fall.” As if my sleep were a penny I lost that someone will hand me back.

Research has shown that the moving forward of the clocks in spring is linked to more heart attacks in the first 3 following days, as well as to increases suicide rates. Obviously, this is not a healthy practice. In fact, the governments of Kazakhstan and Russia cited health concerns due to clock shifts as a reason for abolishing DST.

It was implemented during the First World War with the goal of saving energy since people aren’t expected to need to turn lights on as early in the evening. The energy savings have never been proved.

What I can prove, on the other hand, is that flipping the clocks around messes with my sleep and with the sleep of my toddler – and this is something I take very seriously.

The only upside is that I’m blogging this at 10 p.m., but it feels more like 9 p.m.