Humans’ Natural Circadian Rhythm Disrupted By Daylight Savings Time

October 28, 2007 by Jimson Lee

Daylight Savings Time is still a week away in USA & Canada.

If you are reading this today, and your computer clock is one hour behind, you need to patch your computer, unless you are still running Windows 98. In that case, you will have to adjust it manually, or just get rid of Windows 98.

Normally Daylight Savings Time ends the last Sunday of October for Canada and United States. Daylight Savings Time now starts 3 weeks earlier in March, instead of the first Sunday in April, and for the fall, ends the first Sunday in November.

There are exceptions:

In Canada, the majority of Saskatchewan and parts of northeastern British Columbia do not observe DST but instead stay on “standard time” all year long.

In the USA, Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii and the territories of Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa are the only places in the U.S. that do not observe DST.

How does this affect sleep?

My article on The Best Method to Sleep using your REM cycle is the most popular article on this Blog.

Well, there will be an adjustment period, similar to long distance travel (cross country or overseas), as it could take up to one day per time zone traveled. My advice is to try to fight it right away, even if it means a few groggy mornings. After all, it is mind over matter. If you are really motivated in life, you will wake up feeling energized and ready to go.

From:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/86678.php

When people living in many parts of the world move their clocks forward one hour in the spring in observance of daylight saving time (DST), their bodies’ internal, daily rhythms don’t adjust with them, reports a new study appearing online on October 25th in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The finding suggests that this regular time change — practiced by a quarter of the human population — represents a significant seasonal disruption, raising the possibility that DST may have unintended effects on other aspects of human physiology, according to the researchers.

“When we implement small changes into a biological system which by themselves seem trivial, their effects, when viewed in a broader context, may have a much larger impact than we had thought,” said Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, Germany. “It is much too early to say whether DST has a serious long-term impact on health, but our results indicate that we should consider this seriously and do a lot more research on the phenomenon.”

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Written by Jimson Lee · Filed Under Recovery, Health & Wellness

Comments

One Response to “Humans’ Natural Circadian Rhythm Disrupted By Daylight Savings Time”

Sleep Disruption and Daylight Savings Time Change | SpeedEndurance.com on March 2nd, 2008 12:51 am

[…] already wrote about the Humans’ Natural Circadian Rhythm Disrupted By Daylight Savings Time last […]

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