How daylight saving time can impact your health as debate surrounding eliminating it continues
A health expert has outlined how daylight-saving time can have negative impacts on your body.
In case you somehow haven’t noticed, each year we put the clocks back in autumn and put them forward in spring and have been doing so... well for over a hundred years.
Now, while most people celebrate getting that extra hour in bed in autumn, on the flipside losing an hour of sleep does tend to be annoying come spring.
A health expert has said that simple hour shift can actually have negative impacts on the body and as well as this the bi-yearly change has been linked to increased car crashes, heart attacks, workplace accidents and weight gain.
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The former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Jennifer Martin, spoke about the impact daylight saving has on people’s health.
She said: “The spring time change leads to society-wide sleep deprivation.”
She said losing an hour of sleep might not seem like the biggest deal in the grand scheme of things, she said it has a big impact because many Americans are already not getting enough sleep.
She added: “Many Americans are already chronically sleep deprived or suffering from sleep disorders.
“This extra disruption amplifies any of the symptoms that they're already having.”
She also said the time change, impacts our circadian rhythm... which you will likely have heard of it referred to as your ‘internal clock’. This shift, however slight, means our bodies are not as aligned with the rising and setting sun.
Martin continued: “Our circadian rhythm is our internal clock, and it is very tightly linked to the 24 hour day.
“[Daylight saving] actually alters the relationship between our internal clock and the external environment.
“When we're on Standard Time, the daylight hours are more closely aligned with our circadian rhythms.
“When we shift to daylight saving time, it's dark later in the morning, and that is not good for our overall health and wellbeing.”
There are talks that this could become a thing of that past under Donald Trump’s leadership. Trump has said it is a ‘50/50 issue’ so it isn’t exactly clear if Americans will stop with the practice.
Trump’s advisor, billionaire Elon Musk, has previously written on Twitter that it ‘looks like people want to abolish the annoying time changes’.
While Musk doesn’t make laws, his growing influence in the Trump administration is hard to ignore.
Topics: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Health, Weather
Gerrard Kaonga