With last Sunday’s termination of St. Cloud’s annual Daylight Saving Time displacement came USAToday’s broadside against the whole DST campaign:

“Is daylight saving time healthy for you? No, experts say….”

Now they tell us! If it seems that you can recall (through the fog of last weekend’s sleep-disturbed haze) that experts were never in agreement about the wisdom of the Daylight Saving rigamarole, you are not alone. But if USAToday is to be trusted, it now seems that suddenly, the results are in. Daylight Saving is a menace. Time changes “throw off your sleep cycle.” We get less sleep.

End of discussion?

Well, not quite. As yet, there has been unsuccessful support for plans to end the practice, despite the scientific reasons to do so. In March, the Senate even approved a bill to make it permanent! The Sunshine Protection Act may have been seen as a security measure elsewhere in the Solar System, but not, apparently, in the House of Representatives, where it’s stalled in committee.

All this despite one simple reason cited by Dr. Sabra Abbot, a professor of neurology in Northwestern’s Department of Sleep Medicine. She explains how DST forces the “wall clock” to move further away from the “sun clock.” Noon is supposed to be more or less the point at which the Sun is highest in the sky, which is how it behaves when standard time is observed. But when Daylight Saving prevails, this “dealing with competing clocks” makes it harder to both wake up and fall asleep—a double whammy if ever there was one. The effect is most bothersome around this time of year as DST is due to end. Our internal clocks don’t know it’s time to wake up.

Apologists for DST think the practice saves energy, prevents traffic accidents, and reduces crime, but there is scant hard evidence to back that up—whereas the effects of long-term sleep deficiency are not disputed.

Nevertheless, unless local critics of our St. Cloud Daylight Savings ritual are willing to move down to Mexico (it’s forbidden there, except along the U.S. border), they will have to once again brace themselves for next March 12, when we’ll lose another hour. Until then, we can rest easier knowing that on Sunday, we got one back!

The shorter daylight hours of autumn and winter barely constrain showings and open house schedules—they often succeed as well as their summertime counterparts. Call me for any and all of your St. Cloud real estate doings! 

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