Turning back the clock 1 hour takes a serious toll on your mental health

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Daylight saving time should be a permanent, year-round phenomenon. Rather than turning back our clocks this weekend to extend our pre-election suffering by yet another hour, we should simply leave the hour hand where it is and pledge to never fiddle with it again.

The social and public health benefits would be enormous. The fall transition to standard time is linked to an increase in crime that costs the country billions of dollars annually. Transitions into and out of daylight saving time are linked to disrupted sleep patterns, increased heart attack risk, and an uptick in fatal car accidents.

And last week, a team of researchers from the departments of psychiatry and political science at the universities of Aarhus, Copenhagen and Stanford added another formal complaint to the indictment against clock-turning: The autumn shift to standard time appears to be closely linked to a jump in depression diagnoses around this time of year.

READ the entire article here.