The conversation
The dark side of daylight saving
An engineer in New York was driving in December 2013 after a train he was driving crashed. Lack of sleep could have been a factor. AP Photo / Robert Stolarik A train swerved around a corner at 82 km / h and eventually derailed, killing four passengers. Decades earlier, erroneous decision-making had led to the deaths of the seven staff members of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Years before these events, a stuck valve regulating the supply of refrigerant to a nuclear reactor nearly led to the collapse of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. In each of these cases, poor or insufficient sleep was one of the factors that contributed to the failure. Even if you are not an engineer working in one of the contexts, the chances are pretty good that you will sometimes fall asleep. In fact, more than a third of American adults sleep less than the suggested minimum of seven hours a night and two-thirds of American teens sleep less than the recommended minimum of eight hours. Even for those with good sleep hygiene, there is one time of the year when you probably get little sleep – the annual shift to daylight. As an organizational psychologist at the University of Oregon, I researched a variety of ways sleep affects employees. In particular, my colleagues and I are investigating how circadian wrong adjustments due to the shift to daylight decisions lead to costly work and social outcomes. Even with the extra daylight, the facts do not look so good. The American public has had a love-hate relationship with daylight saving since it first became law in 1918. Personal preferences aside, the empirical evidence for the intended benefits of daylight saving. time is mixed at best, while the cost of switching to summer time is becoming increasingly clear. At the heart of these costs is the effect of time shift on our sleep patterns. As we jump forward, the clocks move against the wall, but our body clocks do not change as easily. It usually takes a few days to adjust to the time change in a way that enables us to fall asleep at the normal time. As a result, Americans sleep about 40 minutes less than usual after the switch from Sunday to Monday night. Together with my colleague, I first investigated the impact of the shift to daylight saving on workers in blueboard settings. Using a database of mining injuries from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, we discovered that the spring shift to solar injury led to a 6 percent increase in mining injuries and a 67 percent increase in workdays due to these injuries were lost. Dangers even if you work above ground Although these findings may be of concern, you may have more experience with computers than with mining equipment, and you are probably reading this article at work. It makes sense then to consider how the shift to daylight businesses affects workers in white-collar institutions. We tried to understand these possible consequences by examining how people used their internet access on the day following the time change. By researching the Internet over more than six years in more than 200 different U.S. metro areas, we found that searches for entertainment or related categories occurred much more Monday after the time change (3.1-6.4 percent) than on Monday before and after the time change. Since much of this search activity took place at work, we came to the conclusion that workers are abusing their Internet access when they would be working – a behavior called cyberloafing. Such shortcomings at work as a result of the time change indicate that people are less productive when they are moderately sleepless due to the time change. Misuse of computers at work can be costly. rawpixel / Shutterstock.com Only based on the findings of our two studies, coupled with a study showing that the time change predicts an increased incidence of heart attacks by 5 percent, economists estimate that the annual spring change the U.S. economy each year US Cost $ 4 million. . Yet this is not where the cost ends. The time change affects our judgment. Our research has also revealed that the shift to summer time affects our ability to see the moral characteristics of a given situation. We re-examined internet research behavior and followed up our own experiment. In the experiment, we kept half of our research participants awake throughout the night and allowed the other half to sleep a full night. The next day we presented scenarios that contained different levels of moral content. We found that people were less able to discern the day after the shift to saving the sun or after a night’s sleep deprivation when a situation involved issues of moral importance than when they were well rested. The time change also affects our judgment in formal environments. A recent study found that judges handed out harsher sentences – longer than 5 percent – the Monday after the time change, compared to other days of the year. This means that sleep and public policy regarding sleep can influence important decisions that need to be impartial. Judges measure longer sentences after the time change, a study found. Denis Simonov / Shutterstock.com These studies are only the tip of the iceberg, with adverse effects of the time change ranging from student tests to stock market returns. No matter what your sentiment towards daylight saving, the accumulation of evidence shows that the cost of moving to summer time is cutting across society. Although the negative outcomes are diverse, the simple solution seems pretty simple: rather than changing the clocks, we need to change public policy. Many state legislators have addressed this issue, while state houses from coast to coast are reconsidering the annual usage. As the research evidence is considered, other states may eventually join Arizona and Hawaii in the annual madness of daylight. If we move to this possibility, it may be easier to save lives and money rather than rushing into the daylight. This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to the exchange of ideas from academic experts. Read more: Sleepy? You could run the risk of confessing to a crime you did not commit. Even presidential candidates need sleep Sleepy teenage brains need school to start work David Wagner later in the morning, consult, do not own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article and have not made any relevant commitments outside their academic appointment.