Daylight Savings Is Killing Our Hormonal Health

If you find yourself in the part of the population that dreads turning the clocks back every fall, you’re not crazy. While it’s annoying to figure out the nuances between the clock on your microwave and the settings on your car stereo, the time change affects more than just our appliances. 

In an era where it’s fashionable to alter our body with supplements, medications, and other biohacks, the hormones that influence our sleep, wakefulness, and mental health can be radically altered by surprisingly unsophisticated features of our environments.

Burning Daylight

While daylight savings time is a relatively recent invention, cultures have shortened and lengthened time periods according to the seasons since, well, the beginning of time. In Ancient Rome, for example, an hour could last for 44 minutes in the winter, but 75 in the summer. Daylight savings time as we know it, however, first made its way across the pond in the early 1900s, originating to optimize the amount of daylight people had during free waking hours.

William Willett, an otherwise relatively unknown builder, first lobbied English Parliament in 1907 with his publication The Waste of Daylight, which painted a picture of the squandering of daytime while people were indoors with the curtains closed. He argued that although “the sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep,” there “remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.”

Willett’s original proposal only mentioned in passing the idea of energy savings, but by the time his ideas achieved intercontinental popularity, electricity was the main justification, at least officially. In the U.S., daylight savings time went into effect in 1918 to support the war effort, both for the expressed reasons of saving electricity by better aligning people’s waking hours with daylight and for more commercial reasons. The legislation was not without substantial support from the Department of Commerce, which wanted to maximize the number of hours in a day that people could get out and shop. Sports were an early accidental benefiter, especially ones without artificial lighting like baseball and golf, leading still others to support DST’s positive effects on public health.

Strokes, heart attacks, workplace injuries, and car accidents see precipitous upticks when the time changes due to the disruption in people’s normal sleeping patterns. 

Sleeping on It

So what’s wrong with a switch to sports, health, and some extra shopping sprees? Well, the switch itself. Many people are already aware of the effects of daylight savings time on the day of the switch, or the “spring ahead” and “fall back.” Strokes, heart attacks, and even workplace injuries and car accidents all see precipitous upticks when the time changes due to the disruption in people’s normal sleeping patterns. Our sleep schedules are more fragile than we often think, so contrary to popular belief, it’s not just about losing the hour of sleep when the clocks “spring” forward. Even gaining an hour through the “fall” back disrupts sleep enough to cause an uptick in health events, leading doctors to believe the issue lies in the switch itself. Despite gaining an hour, most people still lose sleep on “fall back” day and in the days following, simply due to the disruption to our circadian rhythms.

This means that even if catching up your alarm clock is a one-time reset, the whiplash on your hormones is anything but a smooth transition. "That one-hour change may not seem like much, but it can wreak havoc on people’s mental and physical well-being in the short term," Dr. Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, says of the transition. This is because no matter what our clocks say, our bodies still stay with the sun. Morning light increases our bodies’ level of the hormone serotonin, which boosts our mood and helps stimulate wakefulness, and evening darkness increases our levels of melatonin, which helps us fall asleep. Hormonally, this means that the “spring forward” switch, with darker mornings and lighter evenings, makes it more difficult for us to wake up and more difficult to fall asleep. 

As for women’s health in particular, although there’s no evidence that daylight savings has a direct effect on your menstrual health, the same hormones that affect your circadian rhythms can also have cascading effects on your fertility. One study by Boston Medical Center found that “disruption of circadian rhythms in the form of shift work, jet lag, and daylight savings time changes have been associated with poorer fertility and early pregnancy outcomes,” and even increased rates of miscarriage.

Time for Change

If we want to eliminate the negative effects of switching back and forth between time schedules, we have two options: permanent daylight savings time, with more daylight in the evening, and permanent standard time, with more light in the mornings and earlier sunsets. When polled, 80% of people prefer getting rid of our current switching back and forth, but further proposals can get dicey. Of the two options, the plurality of people prefer permanent daylight savings time, often because they value having the extra sunlight after work. However, many sleep experts say this is not ideal for our sleep cycles, since we would be fighting the sun to wake up and fighting our lack of melatonin to fall asleep.

Setting the clocks back is associated with depressive episodes, in one study increasing the number of hospitalizations in the following 10 weeks.

Still, other health effects of standard time mean that what’s best for our sleep may not be ideal for our holistic health. Mental health effects, in particular, tend to see major issues when the clocks fall back, meaning that better sleep doesn’t necessarily mean better mental states. Setting the clocks back has been associated with depressive episodes, in one study increasing the number of hospitalizations for a period of 10 weeks following the time change. While it’s unclear whether all of the responsibility for these depressive episodes is the sunlight alone, the time change does appear to have a unique effect on triggering depression for those affected. In the study, researchers believe this may be due to the time change itself signaling depression to come for those who have previously suffered from seasonal affective disorder, meaning the switch itself, not the sunlight, may be responsible.

Waiting on the World To Change

If waiting for daylight savings regulations to change doesn’t seem like your speed, there are a few things you can do to help your hormonal health in the meantime. Ideally, these tend to involve aligning your light exposure and activity as best as possible to your desired waking hours. In the morning, this means minimizing your exposure to light until your desired waking hour, for example, by using a sleep mask or blackout curtains to keep the sun from disrupting those last few hours of z’s. Depending on your schedule, you might also consider shifting your meals and exercise to fit your ideal circadian rhythms. Finally, while relying on synthetic hormones isn't an ideal long-term fix to reset your circadian hormones, melatonin or other alternatives can be a helpful one-time tool if you find yourself struggling to adjust, especially if you’re hopping across time zones frequently during the holiday season.

Closing Thoughts

Whether we stick with permanent daylight savings or permanent standard time, eliminating a seasonal switch between time schedules is the most important step in creating a healthier environment for our hormonal and holistic health. Both proposals involve trade-offs for both our sleep and mental health, but sparing ourselves from the switch will save headaches, and heart attacks, alike.

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