In July, my post about the big debate over yearly time changes described the position of professional sleep organizations that permanent standard time (ST) is more aligned with our circadian physiology than permanent daylight saving time (DST), or the alternating system we currently have in the U.S. (except in Arizona). As a member of one of those organizations, and having read their arguments, I am in favor of permanent standard time.
Since I posted, an interesting study was released to journalists on October 29, which estimated the number of dark-morning student-commutes to school we would see if the “Sunshine Protection Act” (proposing permanent DST) had been passed by the Senate and signed into law. Rodríguez Ferrante and colleagues at the University of Washington calculated that the number was around a billion. Central to their argument against permanent DST was their analysis of a decade of national fatal crash records, which found that there were higher odds of pedestrian involvement in dark-morning crashes than light-morning ones (odds ratio [OR] 1.77), and even higher odds for children aged 5–18 (OR 2.22). Safety for children waiting for the bus and riding to school in buses and cars was a primary concern of some senators.
How have you and your family adjusted to this fall’s time change? As for myself, after four days, I still get sleepy earlier in the evening and wake up earlier. I am in the “elderly” demographic, and it seems that with older age comes slower adjustment by the circadian clock (Lombardi, 2025). Lombardi explains that infants and older persons have a harder time adjusting to time changes, and the article also describes the physiology that makes adjustment difficult for many of us. Typically “spring foward” is more difficult for evening types (owls) than for morning types (larks), since they have to adjust to getting up earlier.
I came across an interesting fact in an American history book. It stated that “On Tuesday, October 30, 1787, readers of a newspaper, the New York Packet, found on the front page an advertisement for an almanac that came bound with tables predicting the ‘Rising and Setting of the Sun,’ the ‘Judgement of the Weather,’ the ‘Length of Days and Nights’…” (Lepore, 2018, p.xi.). This was, of course, Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. And while other almanacs with such information were available in early America, Franklin’s was the most read secular book of the time (the Bible was first overall). It is interesting to ponder what Franklin would have thought about changing the clocks and which of the three most discussed alternatives he might have supported. Among his inventions was a clock, and I have no doubt that he could have altered it to automatically adjust for yearly time changes.
