While it usually only takes most Canadians a few days to adjust to the shift between daylight saving time and standard time, sleep experts say the biannual time travel harms sleep and has a negative affect on the body’s internal clock.
“The internal body clock essentially aligns itself to the solar clock — the external light-dark environment,” said Dr. Michael Mak, a psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
“Any mismatch between your internal body clock and the external light-dark cycle translates to significant health issues.”
Rather than switching back and forth between daylight saving time (DST) and standard time (ST), Mak and others who study circadian rhythms say we should permanently set our clocks to Standard Time because it better suits the body’s natural rhythms and is better for our health.
Evidence suggests the spring change to DST is more harmful than gaining an hour in the fall, says University of Ottawa associate professor Rebecca Robillard, who directs clinical sleep research at the school’s Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR).
“We’re losing an hour of sleep time in many cases,” she told The Dose host Dr. Brian Goldman.
“This is important because a lot of the population is already sleep deprived to start with,” says Robillard, who also co-directs the University of Ottawa’s sleep lab.
That shift to DST is associated with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and digestive system problems, as well as issues around childbirth and pregnancy, according to research.
MP proposes ditching ‘outdated’ daylight saving time
Countries far from the equator that experience large differences in daylight hours throughout the year adopt DST as a way of taking advantage of longer daylight hours during spring and summer.
As a result, says Robillard, Canadians actually sleep slightly worse during DST because we end up staying up later to take advantage of both the warmer weather and the longer evenings.
“You would hope that we would wake up a little bit later to catch up as well, but because of work and family duties and all of that, our social pressure [curtails] our sleep,” she said.
Both B.C. and Ontario have passed legislation to permanently adopt DST, eliminating the problems associated with the twice-annual switch. In both cases those efforts hinged on neighbouring states and provinces agreeing to do the same.
“The first time I spoke to politicians about this, some of the things that came up was the alignment with [New York Stock Exchange],” said Robillard.
But she says there’s consensus among sleep researchers in Canada that it would be better to stick to Standard Time instead.
Is it time to ditch daylight saving time?
“This is the natural profile of sun exposure that we should be getting,” said Robillard, who is co-chair of the Canadian Sleep Research Consortium.
“Permanent DST would be an artificial, skewed kind of way of trafficking our clocks that might be socially fun, but not biologically founded.”
Patricia Lakin-Thomas, a York University professor who runs the school’s clock lab, says adopting permanent DST would also cause trouble during fall and winter.
“The problem with DST in a place like Toronto is that if we were on DST year round, you wouldn’t see the sunrise until 9 a.m. in the middle of the winter,” she said
Saskatchewan is the only province that doesn’t observe DST, though there are some communities bordering Alberta that do switch their clocks. A report submitted to the Canadian Sleep Society argued that Saskatchewan residents would be “seriously affected by winter DST.”
A Liberal MP earlier this October introduced a private member’s bill to abolish DST in Canada.
The bill likely won’t move through Parliament quickly.
In the meantime, experts say the best way to get ahead of the time change is to shift your schedule by 15 minutes a few days before the clocks are set to shift.
Staying active, as well as trying to maintain regular sleep and eating schedules will also help ease the shift between daylight saving and standard time, Robillard says.
“However, be careful to not [exercise] close to bedtime … because then you might need you might end up activating your system a bit too much and that sends mixed signals to your biological clock that it might be time to wake up and be active.”
Robillard cautions that sleep can’t be banked.
“You can’t sleep in advance and make up for loss of sleep.”
