Lets Quit Changing the Clocks!

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Well, its Sunday morning and we lost an hour. I am sure more people missed church today than almost any other Sunday or a few people showed up at the wrong time (guilty of both of these myself in the past).

There is no debate that we are hard wired to wake up with the sun and go to bed at night. Every cell in our body has a circadian clock. Morning sunlight in your eyes shortly after waking up is a great way to set your clock and tell your body it is time to get moving. It also helps with sleep in the evening as your clock has now "been set".

Despite all the hype around blue blocking glasses in the last couple years morning sunlight is going to have a high level of blue light which is beneficial to your sleep/wake cycle. That is why blue light in the evening can disrupt things.

What can we expect this week by messing around with the clocks:

1. Car accidents will increase on the Monday following the spring forward.

2. There will be more workplace injuries tomorrow and of higher severity than normal.

3. The risk of having a heart attack goes up in the 3 days following the spring clock change. It goes down in the fall when we move the clocks back.....

There are more, but you get the idea. The correct way to do this is split the difference on the half hour between standard time and DST and never change the clocks again. Everyone wins!

A few tips to help avoid the above problems are get some morning sunlight and go for a walk or get some early morning outdoor activity followed by a light breakfast. Those 3 things will send a powerful signal to your body to help set your clock.

Go to bed a little earlier this week. Ideally that would have been a good idea for the week leading up to this but since I am writing this on Sunday that advice is a little late.

Have a great week and enjoy the later sunset. Also as a side note, please do not say the days are longer. The days are still 24 hours and the amount of daylight is exactly the same as before we changed the clocks. All we are doing is moving it from before work to after work.

Dr. Jason

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