Why daylight saving time is worse for your body than standard time

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia will reset their clocks Sunday and spring forward into daylight saving time, giving us an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings but eliminating an hour of early-morning sun.

Morning sun is key to maintaining our circadian rhythms, sleep-wake cycles and overall health, experts say.

Phyllis Zee, a neurologist and the chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said that, without that sunlight, we can slip into circadian misalignment – “when your internal body clocks fall out of sync with that of the sun clock and your social clocks.”

In 2022, lawmakers in the Senate voted to make daylight saving time permanent, but the legislation provoked backlash and the effort has stalled. Versions of the bill have since been reintroduced and discussed, including one that would shift clocks permanently forward by a half hour from standard time and keep them there, but no federal law has been passed.

Sleep experts warn that a permanent change to daylight saving time could chronically throw our bodies out of sync with the sun and lead to a variety of health problems.

“We would be misaligned all year long,” said Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics and the director of Vanderbilt University’s sleep division.

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