![]() In the UK, my anti-DST activism has been met with both support and derision. The European parliament voted to scrap the hour change in 2019 (and a poll showed that a majority of EU citizens agreed) but the bill was then mired in bureaucracy and hasn’t been implemented. Indeed, earlier this month, the US Senate voted to put an end to the changing of the clocks by making daylight savings time permanent. I founded the anti daylight saving time movement Hora Solaris (“solar time” in Latin), because I am convinced that DST can no longer be allowed to exist and must be abolished in not just the UK, but every country implementing it. When I have to keep an appointment between April and October, basic arithmetic is enough to translate it into my time zone. Keeping my clocks on GMT since 2018 has improved my sleep and has made me a slightly less nervous person, as I now know that the day is progressing as it should instead of being artificially rewound or fast-forwarded. Personally, I have struggled with maintaining consistent sleeping patterns for most of my life, and my learning disability (Asperger syndrome) and sensitivity to change makes the transition even more difficult. There is a strong safety case, too: when DST was paused as an experiment in the 1960s, road traffic accidents in England and Wales fell by 11%. ![]() (This was made even worse during the second world war, when British double summer time was introduced, time-shifting the natural day by two hours instead of one.) In 2019, a group of experts in psychology, neurology and sleep cycles concluded that “if we want to improve human health … we should abandon DST”, after studies showed that, in the weeks after a clock change, sleep durations fall and heart attacks increase. Changing our “social clock” creates a gulf between the time on our watches and the height of the sun in the sky. This is because we humans (and many other lifeforms on this planet) are synchronised with Earth’s natural orbit – we naturally wake up when the day begins and sleep when night falls. It may sound extreme (and inconvenient) but I do it because I believe that daylight savings time (DST) is an unnecessary bane on our society a failed experiment long in need of terminating.įor a start, changing the clocks is bad for our health. Since October 2018, I have been living my life entirely by GMT. On Sunday, clocks across the UK will go forward by an hour – except mine.
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