Snow Sunday: The Worst Day of the Year

09 Mar Snow Sunday: The Worst Day of the Year

I don’t know anyone who loathes Daylight Saving Time as much as I do, but I suspect there are some other people out there with similar feelings. “Don’t forget to set you clocks ahead,” people say cheerily every spring. But what I really want to do is throw a clock at them.

I don’t care what the reason is behind it, more efficient use of daylight, reducing energy costs. What it amounts to is me losing an hour of precious sleep, and if there’s one thing I really need in life, it’s sleep. My bed is my sanctuary, my palace. I spend more on my mattress, sheets, comforters and pillows than I do on clothes. Sleep is an absolute necessity. One of the methods the CIA uses to torture prisoners? They play loud, horrible music so that they can’t sleep. This makes perfect sense to me. Not the fact that the CIA tortures prisoners, of course, just the manner in which they choose to do it.

I used to only hate Daylight Saving Time in the spring, moving the clock forward. “Fall Back” was perfectly fine with me, pushing your clock back an hour. It was like you were gaining time. That was before I had kids. Kids have an incredible inner clock, one that doesn’t magically reset like the clock on your cell phone. If they get up at 6 a.m. every day for a month, then they’re going to come into your room and wake you up at 6 a.m., even if it’s really 5 a.m.—so Fall Back is no longer my ally, either.

“One hour of sleep may not seem extreme,” writes Shelby Harris in the NY Times, “but we can’t reset our circadian rhythms as easily as we change the time on the microwave.” She writes about studies that have shown an increase in heart attacks for the three days following the time change, and more frequent traffic accidents, workplace injuries, and even a rise in suicide rates. Of course, there are whole states that are exempt from this madness. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Samoa, Guam. And many countries abolished it long ago: Russia, Japan, and most African and Asian countries. Still, here in Colorado, it persists.

There are things that I would gladly lose an hour of sleep for: an early morning start for a ski adventure, a late night party with friends. But these would be an hour of lost sleep at my own hands, not at the hands of the Greenwich Mean Time clock. I guess it’s not just the lost hour, it is the fact that it is forced upon us. So yes, I will enjoy the “extra” hour of sunlight at the end of the day, but I will do so begrudgingly, and probably not today. For now, I will still be tired and slightly irritable—until my circadian rhythm finally adjusts.