Time to call time on daylight saving?

£344. That's the cost in financial terms to your happiness of the clocks changing this week. That's according to a study from researchers at the London School of Economics, who've been looking at the lifestyle impacts of putting the clocks for and back each spring and autumn. But why do we do this at all?

Chris - We can actually blame our friends in Canada. Two towns there began to shift their clocks in 1908 to increase available light during the working day for residents. Hence daylight saving. Other countries saw what they were doing, liked the idea, and the practice then caught on worldwide. Subsequently becoming very much de rigueur in France and other European countries, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In the UK it was conceived as a way to save coal during World War I. Not everyone leapt aboard though, and most Asian, African and Latin American countries don't alter their clocks twice a year. Moreover, an increasing number of countries are now stepping back from the practice. Russia abandoned daylight saving in 2014. Mexico ditched the idea in 2022 and the EU voted to end it in 2019, although they haven't moved on the motion yet. Maybe because they haven't had time. Surprisingly even clock change stallwarts America dabbled in dumping DST back in the 1970s, but reports of morning road accidents involving children unfortunately put paid to the idea and they rapidly reverted to the status quo, even when it's subsequently emerged that there'd been a compensatory drop in accidents in the afternoon. It's now back on the cards there though with some US states already sticking to a single time zone, another adjacent states talking about linking up into a single time zone that they'll use all year round. So what's prompting people worldwide to rethink and even reverse the 1908 logic of seasonal clock changes now? It's because a growing body of evidence is accumulating that these timing shifts are playing havoc with our health. In the week after clocks advance in spring, heart attack rates go up by nearly a quarter, and a study from Finland showed that strokes also surge over the same period while another recent report showed a 6% increase in road accidents. At the same time, a study in Europe and Australia, that asked school children to wear activity monitors, found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the children were much more physically active when the evenings were lighter. Time has a profound effect on our bodies. Morning sunshine sets our body clock by sending signals into the brain from specialized detectors in our eyes. The brain master clock then uses hormonal and other signals to entrain every cell in the body to the same time. So we are effectively operating our own internal time zone. And this means that the metabolism and the activity of every one of our 37 trillion cells is singing in time from the same biochemical song sheet. Our energy supplies gear up before we wake up in readiness for the day ahead. Under the control of these internal clock processes, signals that enliven the brain and throw our thoughts into gear are already beginning to surge, ready for when the alarm goes off. And before the boiled egg is even on the table, our intestines are getting ready to digest our breakfast and send the calories we consume into the bloodstream to power our essential organs. But this well oiled machine goes out of sync if we play with our timekeeping, even by a small amount. Changing time zones, which is what daylight saving effectively does, makes the biochemical song miss a beat. It's a bit like preparing a meal a bit too early or a bit too late for a dinner party. Either the food goes to pot or the guests are in a foul mood. Or both. And what scientists increasingly agree on is that it's not so much the time we keep as the change in time that causes the mischief causing a jolt to the system, which in some susceptible people makes other health problems much more likely to manifest. So it probably is high time that we did call time on these sorts of time changes. Watch this space. The clock is certainly ticking.