I'm not the problem

at least this week

I’m using the time that I would have spent recording and editing this week’s newsletter to take a nap, so I’m sorry to those of you who prefer listening! 😂

Every year, the week after we spring forward, I feel new levels of exhaustion that I swear I’ve never felt before. Every year, I ask myself how can one hour make such a difference?! Every year, I’m wondering how everybody just keeps functioning while I’m pressing snooze nineteen times and still feeling like I need a nap or three every. single. day. And then, I acclimate at some point in the days after the switch and forget until the following year when I start this whole maddening process all over again. 

This year, instead of so much beating myself up about how hard this is for me, I decided to figure out what the costs and benefits are of Daylight Savings Time (DST). Over the course of the last week, I had several conversations about the origins of DST, and, in every conversation, someone had a different idea of why it came about. One person said it was an idea of Benjamin Franklin’s to get us to work harder. I had always assumed the farmers wanted it, but the truth of DST’s origins are far more mundane: 

In 1895 British-born New Zealand entomologist George Hudson proposed changing clocks by two hours so that he could have more hours in the afternoon to collect insects. He presented his idea in a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society and while his suggestion was initially met with skepticism from his peers, it would eventually become modern-day DST…Port Arthur and Fort William in Ontario, Canada, were the first regions in the world to implement DST in 1908. This was followed in 1916 by Germany and Austria-Hungary during WWI as a way to conserve fuel. Many European countries followed suit.

DST was first introduced in the US in 1918, sold as a way to conserve fuel during the war - and as a way to extend the working day¹. According to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, “The first and most persistent lobby for Daylight Saving in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if their department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.” The 1918 bill was repealed and reinstated several times until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act was passed, which required entire states to either opt-in or out of DST instead of individual cities and counties being able to choose. In the 1980s, several industries joined together to form the National Daylight Saving Coalition, and they lobbied successfully for Congress to expand DST from six to seven months in 1986. Their hard work paid off again in 2005, when Congress, as part of their energy bill, lengthened DST from seven months to eight months².

The data actually shows that there is no energy savings from DST, despite lobbyists continuing to argue otherwise. There is a ton of good research on how detrimental DST is to our physical health: a 25 percent increase in the number of heart attacks on the Monday after we spring forward compared to other Mondays throughout the year, the effects of stress associated with messing with our circadian rhythms, increased risk of cancer, slower metabolism and increased rates of depression³.

All of this research, if nothing else, made me feel better about my extreme fatigue and brain-fog this week, but it also showed me how arbitrarily this huge thing that we structure our lives around was decided - and how recently all of these changes came about! A few industries decided that they could make more money if we had an extra hour of daylight during the sunniest seasons of the year, so they made up some theories that seemed reasonable enough, spent a boatload of money to convince lawmakers of the wisdom of their false premises, and eventually got a national law passed. But they weren’t happy with just six months, so they lobbied for seven - and won, and then eight - and won. 

Obviously, this is how big government and big business work. Despite a ton of evidence that shows how damaging this policy is to our physical health and well-being, as well as the fact that it actually costs us more energy despite what the business interests have tried to sell us, their interests keep winning while we’re stuck to deal with the deleterious effects. And then we’re the ones walking around asking what is wrong with us instead of why do we do this?! 

You can’t help but wonder how subjective it [waves her hands around wildly to encompass everything] all is. Time itself is a construct of course, but we judge others based on whether or not they’re on time, even though you could hop on a plane to a different place and find vastly different ways of living with and valuing time.  The Paleo aficionados talk about how we should eat like our ancestors ate, but you never hear them saying we should ditch our clocks. Our ancient ancestors let the light of the sun structure their days, and it begs the question of how we evolved to do the same.

I have a day job, my kids go to school and have lots of activities that they require me to drive them to in a timely fashion, and I am generally involved in things in my community that require me to attend at certain times. I can’t, of course, ditch the clock and live like our ancient ancestors did, but I still think it’s worth questioning why we hand so much of our lives over to something so capricious as a clock, especially when we find out corporate interests are largely behind the way we set our clocks. 

I’ve been working my way through The Dawn of Everything, and the thing that has stuck out to me thus far is how much the native cultures, especially of the Americas from what we know of them, valued freedom. The native peoples of the Americas, when they first encountered Europeans, pitied them for their lack of freedom over their own lives. The Europeans were beholden to their kings, their religions, and to maintaining their wealth or obtaining more of it. The original (and true) Americans largely had control over how they lived. Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, a French soldier who was sent to North America in 1683, lived among the Wendat people in what is now the land around Lake Ontario; after returning to France, he wrote a very popular two volume book about his observations of living with the Native Americans during his travels. Summarizing what the Wendat said of the colonizers, he wrote:

They [the Wendat] brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.

Acknowledging the forces behind our clocks during this week of spring forward, makes me jealous of the indigenous people that had so much more control over their own lives and challenges me to recover some of the autonomy and freedom I’ve handed over to cultural norms, “shoulds,” and the “way it’s always been.”

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

• Speaking of living in tune with nature, this study shows that we don’t really adjust to DST - our circadian rhythms stay in sync with the cycle of the sun.

• One of my life goals is to learn the names of the trees, birds, and plants native to and around my place. I have found it easier in some cases to identify trees by their buds in the spring versus by their leaves. Here is a great primer of what the buds of the most prominent trees look like in the spring.

• Science seems to show that the reason why DST has so many harmful effects is because it throws us out of sync with the sun. Huberman has committed his career to studying the effects of light on all of our bodies’ functions. Here is a pod on his recommendations when it comes to getting enough sunlight.

• The spring equinox is my new year - and it’s next week! Some ideas around how to celebrate over on the blog.

• A few years ago, I found this quote somewhere - I have no idea where now, but it’s been on a notecard by my bed ever since. It reminds me that, when I’m having a rough day or a short fuse, most likely, I just need some more or better sleep:

May you get as much sleep as you need to be kind. How much sleep do you need?

Go get some rest - you probably need it!

Sara 

1. Of course.

2. To read more about how hard various industry lobbyists worked for DST, check out this post.

3. Links to studies with waaayyy more data here if you’re into that kind of thing.