DST vs. Body Clock???

A custodian checks Kansas's Clay County courthouse clock after daylight savings ended last year.

Photograph by Charlie Riedel, AP

Something's messed up around this time of the year.
Ever since Sunday, I've been feeling out of it. Sunday is coincidentally the same day that we all "sprang forward". So, can I attribute this to Daily Light Saving Time (DST) changes?

The National Geographic*  recently reported on some interesting findings.

Daylight Saving Time 2011: Why and When Does It Begin?
Brian Handwerkfor National Geographic NewsUpdated March 13, 2011

Daylight Saving Time: Healthy or Harmful?

For decades advocates of daylight savings have argued that, energy savings or no, daylight saving time boosts health by encouraging active lifestyles—a claim Wolff and colleagues are currently putting to the test.

"In a nationwide American time-use study, we're clearly seeing that, at the time of daylight saving time extension in the spring, television watching is substantially reduced and outdoor behaviors like jogging, walking, or going to the park are substantially increased," Wolff said. "That's remarkable, because of course the total amount of daylight in a given day is the same."

But others warn of ill effects.

Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, said his studies show that our circadian body clocks—set by light and darkness—never adjust to gaining an "extra" hour of sunlight to the end of the day during daylight saving time.

"The consequence of that is that the majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired," Roenneberg said.

One reason so many people in the developed world are chronically overtired, he said, is that they suffer from "social jet lag." In other words, their optimal circadian sleep periods are out of whack with their actual sleep schedules.

Shifting daylight from morning to evening only increases this lag, he said.

"Light doesn't do the same things to the body in the morning and the evening. More light in the morning would advance the body clock, and that would be good. But more light in the evening would even further delay the body clock."

Other research hints at even more serious health risks.

A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that, at least in Sweden, heart attack risks go up in the days just after the spring time change. "The most likely explanation to our findings are disturbed sleep and disruption of biological rhythms," lead author Imre Janszky, of the Karolinska Institute's Department of Public Health Sciences in Stockholm, told National Geographic News via email.

Read the full article here

So what do you make of all this? Do you believe that DST is actually bad for your health?




*Sarky's employer when she becomes a world-renowned photo-journalist, inshaAllah! :)