An additional hour in bed may refresh you.
However, if experts are to be believed, the time change later this month could have negative implications.
Every year, on the last Sunday of March at 1:00 a.m., we lose an hour of sleep in the name of daylight saving, a practice that began during World War I to extend evening hours and conserve coal.
When do the clocks return to standard time to finish British summertime?
This year, the clocks fall back at midnight on Sunday, October 30. The clocks will be set back one hour, meaning you will experience midnight to midnight twice.
This means that those celebrating Halloween will get an extra hour to spend out on the town, while night employees will be less thrilled.
Why do time zones exist?
In 1908, a bill that was ultimately defeated sought to advance the clocks in the summer to allow additional daylight hours for the training of the Territorial Army. It was also hoped that this action would lessen the number of train accidents.
In the same year, however, the Canadian British colony of Port Arthur was the first to advance their clocks.
It would be eight years before Britain followed suit, with the Summer Time Act of 1916 advancing clocks by one hour to match Germany. This would conserve fuel for the war effort by minimizing the requirement for illumination during the longer, brighter evenings.
Since then, there have been biannual discussions regarding the necessity of daylight saving, and the health consequences may alter your perspective.
Although the effects are transient and compared to jet lag, some sleep scientists are concerned that they are much more severe.
The interruption may increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to experts. It has also been associated with a rise in automobile accidents.
Not to mention the obvious bad mood brought on by disrupted sleep, one of the most prominent side effects of time manipulation.
Strokes
Russell Foster, a professor at Oxford University, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the circadian rhythm, or the body’s internal clock.
It determines the rhythms of our lives, affecting everything from the clarity of our thoughts and the readiness of our digestive systems to the strength of our muscles.
During the day, sunshine causes the brain to transmit alert messages that keep us awake and attentive.
The system, analogous to the sophisticated mechanism within a grandfather clock, stimulates the creation of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin at night.
The rhythm itself is crucial to our metabolism, body temperature, and hormone levels as well.
The clocks falling back disrupts these processes, hence disrupting our sleeping schedule.
According to Professor Foster, who authored a best-selling book on the subject, sleep deprivation and a disruption of the circadian cycle can potentially cause a stroke.
In theory, the higher risk is entirely due to the collateral effect of high blood pressure.
Blood clots can form and obstruct blood flow in the arteries leading to the brain due to high blood pressure.
This results in the death of brain cells, which leads to stroke symptoms such as impaired speech and weakness on one side of the body.
Professor Foster stated, “We have this clock, which fine-tunes our physiology and behavior to the 24-hour light and dark cycle.”
We observe rising blood pressure levels. For instance, between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m., the risk of suffering a stroke increases by 50%.
If you are compelled to get up even earlier, you are putting additional stress on your body, which means you are less equipped to deal with it.
He said, “For the majority of us, it’s good because we have a healthy and powerful metabolism, but for those at a higher risk, the transition to daylight savings time can essentially place more stress on our biology and make us more susceptible to illness.”
Several more studies substantiate Professor Foster’s cautions.
In 2016, researchers exploring the correlation discovered an 8% rise in stroke hospital admissions in the two-day timeframe following the time change.
The study, which examined more than 15,000 individuals, also revealed that the risk was greater for those aged 65 and older.
Heart attacks
Dr. John O’Neill is an additional prominent authority on the complex topic of circadian rhythms.
At the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he investigates the 24-hour cycle in all organisms, from bacteria to humans.
His decades of academic research indicate that the stress produced by the time change may increase the incidence of heart attacks.
However, he argues that altering the time has a negligible effect on your health, akin to jet lag.
He stated, “We know that persistent disruption of circadian rhythms, such as in shift employment, is extremely detrimental to health over the long run.
It is extremely rare for anyone to die from shift work, but the related risk is comparable to smoking cigarettes.
He continued, “If you fly to the United States, you get a few days of jet lag during which you are more susceptible to bad health outcomes, but not by a significant amount.”
This is what we observe when the clocks are advanced by one hour; it is similar to experiencing one hour of jet lag.
‘It is such a minor strain to your circadian clock that the vast majority of people can handle it without difficulty.
However, because this is occurring at the population level, there is a modest rise in the frequency of heart attacks.
A study conducted in the United States to determine whether daylight savings time increases the risk of heart attacks concluded that it does.
After the clocks were advanced, there was a 24 percent increase in the number of heart attacks compared to other Mondays throughout the year.
However, the number reduced when the clocks were set back an hour, according to 2013 research.
Although there is a danger of heart problems associated with turning the clocks forward, Dr. O’Neill says the risk is greater during the changeover to daylight saving time.
He stated, “The primary issue with British summertime is that it exacerbates the disparity between the solar clock, which your biological clock tends to synchronize with, and the physical clock that controls our daily routines.”
However, only those who are ill or sensitive to heart disease are at risk, according to him.
Dr. John O’Neill stated that, on a population basis in the United Kingdom, only 30 to 40 additional heart attacks occur in the days after the transition to BST.
The same science that explains the modest rise in strokes also explains the slight increase in heart attacks following the time change: elevated blood pressure.
Plaque – a buildup of fat, cholesterol, and other substances — causes the coronary arteries that supply the heart to gradually become constricted.
When this plaque builds up and hardens, blood clots are more prone to form. Plaque and blood clots can impede blood flow through the heart muscle, depriving it of oxygen and nutrients and resulting in a heart attack.
Depression
Changing the time and interrupting your sleeping routine might affect your mental health similarly to how it affects your physical health.
Professor Foster emphasized that persons who are prone to depression are at a greater risk of becoming depressed if they are sleep deprived.
He stated, “There is evidence that insomnia is closely linked to depression.”
If you disrupt your sleep and get less sleep, and you are susceptible to depression, you are more likely to get it.
If you add a disruptor, such as sleep loss or circadian rhythm disruption, you will be more susceptible to deteriorating into a dangerous state, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
He continued, “If you get less sleep, your brain is more likely to recall negative experiences and forget favorable ones.”
Your worldview will be warped by a lack of sleep. Your entire worldview may be somewhat more pessimistic.
A 2018 study published in The Lancet Psychiatry identified a connection between a disrupted biological clock and depression, bipolar disorder, and other disorders.
A separate study published in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2020 indicated that sleep deprivation can negatively affect our mood.
After five nights of normal sleep and five nights of limited sleep, participants were shown photos of children who were laughing or weeping.
Those with less sleep were more likely to have negative reactions to the photos, the researchers discovered.
Alzheimer’s
Some specialists believe that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s can worsen when the clocks spring forward and fall back.
Professor Foster revealed the phenomena in his work titled “Life Time,” which examines the effects of altering the clocks.
Clinical staff has observed that “sundowning” symptoms, which refer to a condition of perplexity, anxiety, anger, pacing, or roaming that happens in the evening and early at night, worsen when the clocks are adjusted.
The causes of sundowning are not fully known.
However, the Alzheimer’s Society suggests that it may be due to fatigue, hunger, pain, a lack of sunlight throughout the day, and disruption of a person’s body clock due to progressive brain deterioration.
Seasonal affective affliction (SAD)
When the clocks are set back one hour, the evenings become darker as we enter the colder winter months.
Fewer daylight hours in the northern hemisphere are associated with ‘winter depression or seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
Similar to depression, the symptoms include a persistently poor mood and difficulties concentrating.
One of the suspected reasons for SAD is a disruption in the body’s circadian clock.
According to the NHS, your body utilizes sunshine to time different critical tasks, including waking up, therefore decreased light levels over the winter may disturb this and cause SAD symptoms.
Car crashes
As drivers adjust to the darker evenings, the extra hour in bed after the clocks go back has been linked to an increase in road accidents.
According to research by Zurich insurance, this is the case.
Before the fall time change, a quarter of car accidents occurred between 4 and 7 p.m., as determined by an analysis of thousands of claims from 2018 to 2020.
This climbed to over a third of all crashes in November following the time change, prompting them to blame the time shift.
However, the RAC Foundation indicates that cold, wet, and darker evenings rather than driver tiredness are to blame for this phenomenon.
