Bill to Make Daylight Savings Permanent in Congress

Here’s a shocker, a bill that aims to address a long-standing issue has once again stalled in Congress. This time I’m talking about the latest iteration of the Sunshine Act, which would give states the power to make daylight saving time permanent year-round. This would mean that your Fall back next Sunday, November 2nd at 2am. it will someday become a thing of the past. The latest round of that bill seemed to have clearer skies ahead until it hit a roadblock from a senator last week. Let’s shed some light on this not-so-sunny situation.

The Sunshine Act will make daylight saving time permanent

Again, if this law somehow made it through Congress to see the light of day as law, you would no longer have to do the annual Spring forward and Fall back. This means that you change your clocks forward one hour on the second Sunday of every March and back one hour on the first Sunday of every November. The US first implemented the Daylight Savings Time switch with the passage of the Standard Time Act of 1918, and then made sure almost every jurisdiction followed suit with the Uniform Time Act in 1966.

Of course since then our country has found other sources of energy as well as many other ways of wasting energy. So it’s made a lot of people wonder why we’re still doing this switcheroo. That prompted current Secretary of State Marco Rubio to introduce the original version of the Sunshine Protection Act a few years ago when he was a Republican senator from Florida. The sun set on this effort when it could overcome the controversy in the Senate, as I have explained Forbes back to 2022.

This year two other Florida Republicans, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Vern Buchanan, took the mantle from Rubio and championed a new version of that bill. In fact it has already passed the committee stage and last Tuesday reached the Senate floor for debate. This bill would allow states that have already passed permanent daylight saving time legislation to proceed with locking their clocks. On the Senate floor, Scott and other senators tried to advance the bill by unanimous consent to fast-track it, arguing that “this bill is about states’ rights. It allows the people of each state to choose what best suits their needs and the needs of their families.” The bill had bipartisan support and addresses something that many, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have complained about, giving it a seemingly decent chance of passing Congress.

But then grid lock meet. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) refused to offer his consent to the whole issue of unanimous consent. Why did the Cotton club give to it? Well, Cotton was a proponent of making standard time the permanent standard rather than daylight saving time. So, probably with anything new, Congress may once again fall back into an unhappy middle ground for most.

Switching between daylight saving time and standard time can have negative health effects

Yeah, you won’t find too many people saying, “I like to change the time on my watches so I can miss meetings and sleep for a while after that.” Besides fooling a lot of people, this time changing things up might not be so good for your health. A study posted on September 15 at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences He estimated that establishing some type of permanent time—either regular or daylight saving time—throughout the year could prevent 200,000 to 300,000 cases of stroke each year and 1.7 to 2.6 million cases of obesity. The study was conducted by Lara Weed, a graduate student in bioengineering, and Jamie Zeitzer, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. They studied the changes in light exposure experienced by people in different US counties and the potential effects on circadian rhythm and health, based on county-level data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the prevalence of arthritis, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, coronary heart disease, depression, diabetes, obesity and stroke.

Changing the clocks either forward or backward can be akin to giving the population jet lag without the benefit of travel. That’s because it can mess up your circadian rhythm, that innate clock in your body that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle and many of your normal processes. On average, human circadian rhythm cycles last about 12 minutes longer than 24 hours, but can vary greatly from person to person. Different factors such as your exposure to light, activity and surrounding activity can affect this cycle. For example, exposure to light in the morning could potentially shorten it, while exposure to light at night could potentially prolong it.

I have written too Forbes previously about studies showing how accidents and other bad health events, such as heart attacks and strokes, tend to increase immediately after the clock change. This should come as no surprise when the “Spring Forward” part results in the loss of an hour of sleep. But the Falling Back part can also be annoying, even though you might welcome the extra hour of sleep.

There are arguments on both sides of the daylight saving time debate

The US kept moving this clock back and forth mainly because there was so much debate about which was better to make permanent: Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time. The arguments for each direction seem to fall along the lines of when you want to do more of your activities. People who are more “morning people”, otherwise known as Morning Larks, may prefer Standard Time year-round because it will keep more sunlight in the morning hours. And people who are more “Night Owls”, otherwise known as people who are more logical, might say, “Owl go with the DST option” because that will add more daylight to the later hours.

Some, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the National Sleep Foundation, and the American Medical Association, have argued that early morning light exposure is better for your overall health and therefore advocated for the standard time. But you have to wonder how much personal bias there might be in any of these arguments. After all, the medical profession seems to be dominated by morning delights, as evidenced by the prevalence of 7 a.m. meetings, otherwise known as must-miss meetings.

Additionally, many of the studies to date on this DST versus standard time argument have not taken into account the entire complex system involved and population diversity. What’s best for you really depends on a lot of different things. Let’s say you’re more of a Night Owl, otherwise known as a cooler person. Forcing your schedule to be earlier could make you more miserable, which can’t be good for your health. Also, some professional and social circles tend to have activities later at night. If you are in a work or social situation where a given person can be very different based on innate Morning Melancholy versus Night Owl, environment, health status, social situation, work situation and other things. What if, for example, being forced to wake up earlier limits a Night Owl’s work and social opportunities and makes him/her more miserable in general? Would it be better for Night Owl’s overall health?

Additionally, different parts of the world already have significant differences in when the sun rises and sets based on how far they are from the equator. If you’re going to tell people that getting sunlight earlier is better for you, then you should also tell people in northern Sweden, where the sun can rise as late as 9:30am. or not all, “Are you out of luck unless you move to some other part of the world?”