Portland State University assistant neurology professor Bill Griesar makes brain cell neurons out of colorful pipe cleaners. “Time change is bad for us,” he said.
Kristian Foden-Vencil / OPB
A few years ago, Bill Griesar, an expert in neuroscience at Portland State University, went to Fort Vancouver High School to teach kids about brains.
But classes started at 7:30 a.m. and were half empty.
“Kids would tell us that they tried to go to bed,” Griesar said. “But that’s not how the brain is developing. They stare at the ceiling. They’re awake at one o’clock in the morning.”
Young people’s tendency to stay up late has a biological origin, Griesar said. The teen years are when children begin to separate from parents in preparation for establishing their own adult lives. And what better way to pull away from your parents than by being awake at different times?
Griesar brought research on the topic to the Vancouver School District, and district leaders ended up shifting start times to 8:30 a.m. Griesar tells the story to illustrate how important natural circadian rhythms are to health and well-being.
“Time change is bad for us,” he said.
A study in the journal Current Biology found a 6% increase in fatal accidents after daylight saving changes.
Moving our clocks one hour forward or backward, as we’ll all do Sunday morning, increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and workplace accidents. It can even disrupt farming as crops and animals rely on sunlight to regulate their eating and sleeping.
Over the last few years, lawmakers in states across the country have proposed time-change legislation. A bill in Oregon died in the most recent legislative session. Another in Washington passed in 2019 and was signed into law.
But politicians in Washington and many other states made a key misstep in their legislative efforts to make time simpler: They chose to jump forward to permanent daylight saving time, which the federal government does not allow. If they’d chosen to remain on standard time instead, no federal permission would be necessary.
Jay Pea, the president of the nonprofit group Save Standard Time, says businesses favor daylight savings because they think it’s better for the economy.
“The whole thing was cooked up as a way to increase shopping,” Pea said. “These are shopping malls. These are restaurants, automobile dealerships. Businesses that think that if Americans leave the workplace and see that it’s still sunny out, that they will go out and go shopping. They’ll go play golf. Whereas if you leave work and it’s dark, you’re probably going to go home, make dinner and be with your family.”
Pea is based in Arizona, a state that doesn’t need extra sunshine and hasn’t observed daylight saving since 1968. Other sunny jurisdictions like Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam also ignore daylight saving.
Pea said computers, flight and train timetables automatically link to the local time zone so there are no real problems. But out-of-state calls can get confusing.
“There is kind of a brief moment of: ‘Which way is this going now? How did they change their clocks?’” he said. “But it’s not our fault. It’s the fault of those who are changing their clocks.”
Another quirk of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam is that none of their major cities sit on the border of a state that observes daylight saving. Imagine the problems if Portland and Vancouver used different standards to set the time.
Pea thinks the piecemeal approach by states to change their individual time standards is why the effort to end time changes has not been successful so far. He thinks Oregon, Washington and California need to coordinate the change.
Daylight saving time was first introduced in the United States in 1918 to conserve energy during World War I. Extending daylight hours meant people used less energy to light their homes and businesses, so there was more fuel for the war.
Many people think the practice of changing clocks had something to do with kids working on farms. But Pea said that is a myth started in Boston by a newspaper that ran a story listing the reasons for daylight saving time.
“And one of them was: ‘If we make the farmers harvest crops an hour earlier in the morning, they’ll be fresher.’ And of course, the farmers said, ‘That’s poppycock! That’s bizarre!’” Pea said.
Rabbi Motti Wilhelm of the Chabad SW Portland notes the impact government-mandated time changes have on schedules tied to the sun and the moon.
Kristian Foden-Vencil / OPB
The ways government-mandated clock changes affect our daily lives are numerous.
Rabbi Motti Wilhelm of the Chabad SW Portland just printed out the prayer schedule for this coming year. The Jewish calendar is based around the phases of the moon and the position of the sun.
Pointing to the longest day of the year, Friday, June 20, Wilhelm pointed out that evening Sabbath starts at 9:03 p.m., pretty late for a service that lasts an hour. He said if Oregon just stuck to standard time, services could start at 8:03 p.m. instead.
“Standard time all year-round kind of makes sense because that’s the actual time. The sun is meant to be clear overhead at noon,” Wilhelm said.
Oregon lawmakers will try again next year to get rid of the time change. Meanwhile, enjoy that extra hour in bed on Sunday.