Daylight saving time finally ends this Sunday at 2 a.m. — remember to set your clocks back one hour when you go to bed Saturday night — and for many of us, that’s depressing. The day seems to fly by. It’s dark before it’s time to start thinking about dinner.
But many doctors say the return to standard time — and the extra hour of sleep you get in the morning — can be healthy.
“Generally, it is always easier to stay up an hour later than to go to sleep an hour earlier, so most people have relatively little problem setting the clocks back in the fall,” said Dr. Steven Feinsilver, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in an email. “This is because our basic circadian rhythm (the ‘body clock’) actually seems to be programmed for a longer than 24 hour day. It runs a little slow.”
“The circadian clock does not change to the social change,” said chronobiology researcher Till Roenneberg of Ludwig Maximilans University in Munich, Germany. “During the winter, there is a beautiful tracking of dawn in human sleep behavior, which is completely and immediately interrupted when daylight saving time is introduced in March.”
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article courtesy of ABCNews.com
