I grew up without daylight savings and I hate it with a passion.  Now, I have found myself deep in daylight savings country, and I cannot understand why people advocate it.  It messes up an already disjointed time-zone system and it upsets human metabolism and circadian rhythms.  The result is a whole community of tired, stressed people not functioning at their normal capacity.

Think about it.  When daylight savings (DST) starts, you suddenly start waking up an hour earlier than your normal routine, despite having gone to bed at the same time as usual the night before.  So from Day 1, you’ve lost an hour that you never quite recover.  Your body will get hungry at its normal meal/snack times, but you have to force-feed yourself an hour earlier because your break-times have changed.  By evening, the clock is telling you it’s dinner time, although it’s still daylight (and an hour earlier) so your body wants to go for a walk, or sit in the garden or something else equally relaxing.  You end up eating dinner at 8 or 9 pm (by the clock), which then means you’re too full to go to bed at the normal time, so you stay up later.  But then you have to get up earlier than normal again the next day…

And so it goes… Continue reading →