Nearly 40% of the world are turning their clocks back an hour but maybe for the last time. The Fall Back/Spring Forward business could soon be a thing of the past.

U.S. President Donald Trump calls Daylight Saving Time “inconvenient” and “very costly to our Nation." He’s pledged to do away with it in due course. However, only the U.S. Congress can adjust the clocks. In 2022, the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act by unanimous consent, though no iteration ever passed the House.

Today, only Arizona and Hawaii experience Permanent Standard Time: the practice of syncing clocks with natural solar time all year round. Though roughly 30 states have introduced their own legislation to end time changes, few have enacted them. Likewise, the European Parliament proposed removing daylight saving time altogether across the EU, but the initiative presents a confounding challenge for transportation and has yet to be implemented. At the core of the debate about changing clocks lies some science.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) says the U.S. and Europe should adopt Permanent Standard Time pursuant to their public’s overall health and safety. They observe, correctly, that seasonal time changes misalign the universe from man which can result in dangerous health and safety consequences, including: an increase in stroke and hospital admissions, cardiovascular events, and mood disturbances.

Moreover, the AASM reminds us that we've heard this debate before. In 1973, the United States instituted a permanent day light saving routine that objectively failed. Initially popular, the year-round Permanent Standard Time was instituted across the nation in response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. The rationale of which was that longer daylight hours would produce less energy consumption. However, when winter arrived parents grew concerned about their children walking to school in abject darkness which led to a decline in support and repeal of the law within a year.

While the United States and Europe continue to turn their clocks forward, it was Great Britain who initially led the crusade in 1847 when they replaced Greenwich Mean with Railway Time.

In 1883, the United States followed suit with a five-zone system to connect the burgeoning American railways. Based on a telegraph signal from the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh at exactly noon on the 90th meridian, the 1918 Standard Time Act established standard time and officially introduced daylight savings. (DST).

Over the past 100 years, a common theme among researchers of varying backgrounds is that changing clocks causes longterm negative effects.

Opponents of the Sunshine Protection Act argue permanent standard time would be more beneficial to health and human welfare. Numerous health specialists, safety experts, and research societies consider permanent standard time better for health, safety, schools, and the economy. Thats because standard time aligns with the natural circadian cycle.

The circadian clock’s primary function is to rhythmically coordinate biological processes so they occur at the correct time to optimize the fitness and performance. Circadian rhythms have evolved independently in animal, plant and man's kingdoms of life. "Clocks slay time..." William Faulkner wrote, " time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

The AASM agrees. "Syncing our circadian clock to daily routines contributes to safer morning commutes, improved student welfare, religious practices (Orthodox Judaism, Islam), increased exposure to healthy morning sunlight, and higher productivity and wages." They continue:

Conversely, hundreds of scientific studies show that disrupting the circadian clocks leads to increased rates of heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, obesity, depression, substance abuse and suicide.

Morning sunlight, the body’s most potent time-setting cue, tethers human beings to the Earth’s 24-hour day/night cycle. Exposure to sunlight soon after we awaken governs inner clocks that control our sleep, attention, mood, body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, hunger, cell division and hundreds of other bodily functions.

When human beings shift to daylight saving time their morning light exposure drops; biological clocks fall out of sync; we pay a price. Daylight Saving time’s lighter, longer evenings are good for commerce but keep us up longer, spending and engaged so we get to bed later and sleep less; making it difficult and feel impossible to rise with the sun.

The idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours was first proposed in 1784 by the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. In a satirical letter to the editor of the Journal de Paris, Franklin observed that waking up earlier in the summer would economize on candle usage. He even proposed a tax on shutters. However, Franklin later confessed the satirical editorials were a warning of imminent effects of the forthcoming Industrial Revolution on the habits and routines of everyday life.

While industrialized societies rely on clocks to get to work, go to school and coordinate their social lives, agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct were always governed by the light, solar time, and the Earth's natural seasons and axial tilt.

When Franklin created the lightning hypothesis, and calculated the discovery of electricity, he was concerned that technological “contraptions” as he called them "might create conveniences that could lead to apathy in an industrialized society."

Still, 60% of the world demurred and don't change their clocks; rise with the sun; align their circadian rhythms with solar time; and balance their cultures — a tacit agreement between the means of subsistence and the purpose of existence — to the sun. ☀️