Daylight Saving Time Is the Worst

On Sunday, March 10 at 2 a.m., the U.S. and about a third of the world’s other countries will set their clocks forward by one hour, which will make the sun seem to rise later in the morning and hang in the sky longer in the evening. I am not alone in dreading it. Plenty of people want nothing to do with the whole hoary practice. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It’s bad for health, bad for safety, bad for your mood, and just plain unpopular. But that doesn’t stop us from changing the clocks, pointlessly, twice a year. The ridiculous history of Daylight Saving Time The first push for changing the clocks took place in 1907, when British builder William Willett penned a pamphlet titled “A Waste of Daylight,” in which he proposed setting clocks forward one hour. “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep,” he wrote, and yet there “remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.” For years, Willett lobbied Parliament for legislation mandating the change—then died just a year before it was adopted, when the U.K. followed Germany in making the move to conserve daylight, and thus fuel, during World War I. In 1918, the U.S., which was by then one of the combatants too, got on board with the time change. The clocks returned to their pre-war settings after the fighting ended, only to resume the Daylight Sa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news