Re:Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time
by dahart on Saturday October 31, 2020 @10:54AM
(#24951934)
> the negative affects that DST has on society
The last time a DST thread came up a couple of months ago, I dug into all the research being cited, and I found it being wildly overstated and sometimes outright misleading. There seems to be a group of people with an agenda to abolish DST for some reason, but I’ve become even more skeptical about these claims of measurable negative effects.
The tl;dr is that a bunch of papers are being cited that studied long term sleep deprivation, that did not study DST at all. The idea that long term serious sleep loss is bad for you is being applied to (short term, temporary) DST without any evidence that DST is causing any widespread long term lack of sleep.
I do believe strongly in sleep being healthy. But one reason I’m skeptical about supposed negative health claims of DST specifically is that a huge number of people have weekly changes in sleeping habits that are larger than the twice yearly one hour shift. What matters is getting enough sleep long term, and most people adapt to DST fast enough that it doesn’t affect long term sleep — even the article admitted that a few weeks is rare.
The last time a DST thread came up a couple of months ago, I dug into all the research being cited, and I found it being wildly overstated and sometimes outright misleading. There seems to be a group of people with an agenda to abolish DST for some reason, but I’ve become even more skeptical about these claims of measurable negative effects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24314134
The tl;dr is that a bunch of papers are being cited that studied long term sleep deprivation, that did not study DST at all. The idea that long term serious sleep loss is bad for you is being applied to (short term, temporary) DST without any evidence that DST is causing any widespread long term lack of sleep.
I do believe strongly in sleep being healthy. But one reason I’m skeptical about supposed negative health claims of DST specifically is that a huge number of people have weekly changes in sleeping habits that are larger than the twice yearly one hour shift. What matters is getting enough sleep long term, and most people adapt to DST fast enough that it doesn’t affect long term sleep — even the article admitted that a few weeks is rare.