DST: Bah!

This is the second year in which Daylight Saving Time in the US began at the new, earlier date of the second Sunday in March. I hate the whole concept of DST, and, living as I do on the western edge of a time zone, I take exception to the statement in this Live Science article that DST lowers energy bills because electric lighting is not as necessary. This may be true in some areas, but it is not a universal truth. When the sun rises at 8:05 A.M., as it did this morning in Bloomington, you need the lights on in the morning instead of the evening, but you still need them. There is no extra daylight. The human social schedule has just been shifted an hour with respect to the amount of daylight available.

And therein lies the main point of the article: Early morning sunlight is crucial for keeping circadian rhythms in tune. For people who are prone to depression during the winter, effectively getting up an hour earlier after DST starts means that it’s darker when they get up and go through the earliest parts of their day. Other than the idiocy of believing that the whole world should be forced to shift its clocks rather than individuals and businesses shifting their schedules if they choose to, this is the thing that bugs me the most about DST.

It’s always a red-letter day for me in late January when the sun finally starts rising before 8 A.M. and the mornings start getting lighter, and now here we are back to those dark January mornings all over again. Bah. I ordered a dawn simulator alarm clock and I hope maybe that helps. (And it is good that the days are lengthening now much more quickly than they were in January. But still.) My brain will be happier if Indiana someday decides to end the madness and drop back off of DST again. Sorry about the splenetic post; chalk it up to insufficient daylight this morning.