Stop the time change madness. We need to end daylight saving time. | Opinion
What do you think: Should we keep changing our clocks? Or is America ready to make either standard time or daylight saving time permanent?
As an Arizonan, there are moments when I envy the rest of the country. Those moments typically come between June and September, when the thermometer skyrockets above 110 degrees for days on end, and you can hurt yourself straining to remember a time when the sun wasn’t sweltering.
Sunday will not be one of those moments.
While the rest of you spend the day recovering from losing an hour, grumpy, over-caffeinated and generally discombobulated, I, who do not “spring forward,” will be feeling, well, sunny.
On behalf of the rest of the Grand Canyon state (minus the Navajo Nation) and our sensible friends in Hawaii, I beg of you: Join us.
Trump and Musk are right: Cancel daylight saving time
A lot of people – 54% of American adults, according to Gallup – agree with me. (Are you one of them? Take our poll below.) Even President Donald Trump wants to sunset daylight saving time.
While there have been multiple attempts to make daylight saving time permanent, none has made it further than Congress. And now Trump (who has called DST "inconvenient and very costly") and his sidekick Elon Musk have their sights set on time standing still.
Good.
Standard time is better for your health – both physical and mental – and is more closely aligned with our circadian rhythms. If you feel like you’re sleeping worse after springing forward, it’s because you are.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says temporary insomnia symptoms, which occur in 30-35% of adults, "can be caused by a sudden change in schedule, such as the shift to daylight saving time."
Our annual time torture has been linked to an increase in car accidents and heart attacks – and an extra hour of anything isn’t worth that risk.
On the other hand, standard time is more closely aligned with our body’s internal clock. While your day-to-day may be ruled by the clock on your Apple Watch or smartphone, having a permanent misalignment of your internal clock with the sun would have very real consequences.
Sure, 15 hours of sunlight might sound like the dream when it’s cold and dreary out. But get back to me when months of shortened sleep and misalignment are showing real impact on your mental and physical well-being.
Look, being a standard-time-all-the-time person isn’t all easy. It means I am constantly doing time zone math. Because my job and many of my family and friends are based in Eastern Time, my entire existence is spent repeating to myself “three hours in the summer, two in the winter.” That 8 a.m. meeting you invited me to? That’s 5 a.m. my time come Sunday. Now who’s all out of sorts?
Should we stop changing the clocks?
I don't know about you, but I do most of my shopping online, so needing an extra hour of daylight just to run to the store doesn't make much sense anymore. Still, we’ve been debating the necessity of changing our clocks since the practice was reinstated in 1966. Will we ever come to a nationwide decision? I somehow doubt it.
But I want to know what you think. Are you team standard time or pro-daylight saving time? Let us know below.
Janessa Hilliard is the director of audience for Opinion at Gannett.