Daylight Savings Time

We went to Huntington Beach on Saturday night to have a beach barbecue. There are fire pits all down the coast of Huntington Beach, in the area where you first walk onto the sand from the street. The fire pits are in a double row, about 25 feet from each other.

What do beach barbecues have to do with Daylight Savings Time? Nothing, except that while we were at the beach, OCD started whining about DST and how it screws her day all up.



For those who don't know what DST is who happen to find themselves reading this blog (about 75% of the people in the world don't do this), DST is where, in the Spring, we set the clocks ahead one hour, and in the Fall, we set the clocks back one hour. It's kind of a pain in the butt just to get some extra daylight out of the sun. In my opinion, we should just change the time to be permanently set on DST.

You can find a brief history on the reason we use DST here.

Anyways, I told OCD that Daylight Savings Time doesn't affect anything but cows. But really, it doesn't affect the cows. It really affects the farmers, who don't stay on the old schedule in spite of DST. It takes the farmer's two weeks to get the cows adjusted to DST.

But people are not cows, and people have to adhere to a schedule, which means when DST takes affect, we must all set our clocks one hour ahead. I found out that during the first 24 hours after DST, there is a 7% increase in car accidents.

According to this article, your body never does actually adjust to DST because of your natural inner clock, or "Natural Circadian Rhythm."

In one article I read: "Losing just one hour of sleep can disrupt the body's circadian rhythm, potentially disrupting sleep patterns and affecting daily activities, due to sleep deprivation. This situation results in slower thinking and reaction time, as evidenced by the increase in auto accidents in the two days following the Daylight-Saving Time shift - more than on any other day of the year. Moodiness and exhaustion are also common, which can lead to fatigue and irritability." You can read more about it here.