Everyone Drive Safe!! Daylight saving brings risks with loss of sleep The loss of an hours sleep can also result in less productivity, researchers say. Saturday night or Sunday morning we will all mindlessly set our clocks ahead and bemoan the hour we wont get back until October. And on Monday and Tuesday, our risk of having a car accident will rise about 6%, research shows, as will our chances of being in a workplace accident. Productivity traditionally plummets too, in the days after a shift to daylight saving time. So why do we all engage in this annual ritual? Probably not for the reasons you think. Theres a national myth that we switch our clocks to give more daylight to the farmers, but it wasnt until 1966, when the farm lobby was shrunk and weakened, that their half-century of opposition to daylight saving was overruled. Ben Franklin didnt invent it either, although he did suggest that cannons should be fired off at dawn so the lazy Parisians of the mid-18th century didnt waste precious daylight hours. And, contrary to popular belief, switching our clocks doesnt save energy — in fact, it adds to our tab. The reason? The switch encourages us to spend more time outdoors in the evening, driving to shopping malls, patronizing local sports teams and stopping at the convenience store to fill up our tanks and ourselves, said Michael Downing, author of the 2005 book, Spring Forward: the Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, and a creative writing professor at Tufts University outside of Boston. Plus, we all revel in long summer evenings, made possible by that shift in time. Not to be a killjoy, but management professor Christopher Barnes, of the University of Washington, said he only sees a downside to the time shift, which robs us of at least 40 minutes of sleep by Monday morning. I have not seen any benefits of this change, said Barnes, an expert in organizational behavior. Ive only seen a downside in my data and the other studies....
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 20:10:04 +0000
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