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Spring forward one hour Sunday

An hour less for blogging this weekend. I could have sworn it was end of April, but its spring forward this weekend.

TheStar.com - Spring forward one hour Sunday

CANADIAN PRESS

If this weekend's spring ahead one hour into daylight time leaves you a little bleary-eyed come Sunday morning, you are not alone.
Prof. Stanley Coren, Canada's foremost authority on the effects daylight time has on the body, says most North Americans are already chronically sleep-deprived and losing an extra hour can put you over the top.

"Evolution really wanted us to get nine or 10 hours worth of sleep for every 24 and, on average, North Americans are getting 7 to 7-1/2," says Coren, a University of British Columbia psychology teacher.

"When you are sleep-deprived enough, you begin to have what we call micro-sleeps, and that simply means that no matter what it is you are doing, your brain goes into a sleep state for a period of any place from 10 seconds to a minute or more."

Coren says these micro-sleeps can have consequences when you are doing things that require constant attention, such as driving.

In 1996 Coren did a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at car-crash data from Statistics Canada. He found there is about a seven per cent increase in accidents the day after most of the country moves to daylight time.

"You can't simply say, 'Maybe it was because people are in a hurry because they forgot it was daylight saving time,' " Coren says.

"Most of the accidents that follow the daylight saving time are actually later in the day, which is exactly what you would expect if you were dealing with individuals being sleep-deprived."

Most of the country switches to daylight time from standard time in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

The change means that Canadians lose an hour's sleep - except for anyone living in Saskatchewan, Southampton Island in Nunavut, several communities in northwestern Ontario and a few pockets of British Columbia where standard time is a year-round thing.

Daylight time was adopted by several countries during the First World War to save fuel because it meant the sun stayed up later into the evening.

New York was the first city to adopt it in 1918.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with first suggesting the idea in a 1784 essay entitled Turkey versus Eagle, McCauley is my Beagle.

Some believe Franklin was joking, but more than 100 years later a British builder named William Willet made a serious push for the change in a 1907 pamphlet entitled Waste of Daylight.

The official changeover happens at different times across the country: midnight in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, 3 a.m. in Manitoba and 2 a.m. everywhere else.

Some fire departments recommend using the changeover as a reminder to replace the batteries in smoke detectors.

April 2, 2004 at 07:50 AM in My Blog | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home