Philly gains an hour on the longest weekend of the year as standard time begins
Health experts insist this is good for us, even if it means eating dinner when it's dark.
It’s that time of the season when the sun behaves like so many of the rest of us: Reluctant to get out of bed in the morning, ever more anxious to get back there.
Come Sunday it will be setting before 5 p.m. in Philly for the first time since Jan. 13 as most of the nation yanks back the clock by an hour at 1:59:59 a.m., as daylight saving time ends and standard time begins.
Not everyone is juiced about getting home and eating dinner when it’s dark, but sleep experts and the chronobiologists who study bodily rhythms insist that earlier daybreaks — the sun will be rising before 6:30 a.m., as it did two months ago — are better for us than later sunsets.
“Absolutely,” said Robert Satriale, a sleep medicine specialist at Temple Health. He and others suggest that those who dread the earlier darkness just eat the spinach and — by all means — exploit the morning light.
In honor of the longest weekend of the year — by a full 3,600 seconds — here are a few figures of note:
0: The net effect of the time change on the number of daylight hours. We’ve lost about 300 minutes of daylight since the summer solstice, unrelated to the clocks; happens every year. So, why do they call it “daylight saving time?”
3: The number of attitudes President Donald Trump has expressed publicly about the clock-change ritual. In 2019, he stated he favored making daylight saving time permanent; in December, he said he was all for all standard time. He evidently has lost interest. In March, he said the time-change issue is “hard to get excited about.”
34.5: The percentage of days occupied by “standard” time annually. That’s “standard?”
35: The number of states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, known to have legislation pending for year-round standard or daylight-saving time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. States can opt to go all-standard, all the time, but can’t do year-round daylight savings time unless Congress were to enact it for the nation.
126: The number of days before the clocks spring forward again. Don’t get too used to that extra hour of sleep.
1.7 million: With year-round daylight saving time, that’s how many fewer people in the United States would be obese, according to a Stanford University study published in September. It also found that it would reduce strokes annually by 220,000.
2.6 million: The study’s projected reduction in instances of obesity with year-round standard time, with 300,000 fewer strokes. To keep the body’s circadian clock well-synchronized with the rhythms of the 24-hour day, “You generally need more morning light and less evening light, said psychiatry professor Jamie Zeitzer, senior author of the study.
Lara Weed, the lead author, cautioned that the study was hardly the last word. It was performed with computer modeling and didn’t involve human subjects, and would constitute ”just one piece of the puzzle."
Time for a non-change?
Experts in seasonal affective disorder and its lesser variant, the “winter blues,” extoll the virtues of morning light. It is particularly potent because it beams in a “different spectrum” and is “more alerting,” said Phyllis C. Zee, neurology professor at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Earlier sunrises theoretically would afford more opportunities for people to partake.
The change ritual makes unjust demands on our bodies, said Satriale, who treats patients at Temple Health-Chestnut Hill Hospital.
He suggested that people should try to stay on consistent cycles as they adjust to the twice-yearly changes.
The waking process, he said, is not “like a light switch. It’s more like a dimmer switch. We just kind of turn it on slowly as the morning progresses. If you try to get up when your brain isn’t used to waking up, the brain still wants to sleep, and it’s hard to get over that sleep inertia.”