‘falling back’ on the clock by an hour this weekend, giving us an extra hour of sleep, is better than ‘jumping forward’ and losing an hour, but experts say changing clock times twice a year disrupts sleep and other problems causes. health risks.

“So when the clock shifts, our biological internal clock gets confused because our daily activities remain at the same clock time – school still starts at the same time, work starts at the same time – but our body wants to operate at the last time we did that. “I’ve gotten used to it,” says Lauren Hale, a professor in Stony Brook Medicine’s Department of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, and the Program in Public Health.

The ultimate effect, Hale said in an interview Friday, “is disruption in every cell of the human body. It affects mood. It affects sleep. It affects fatigue. And those things affect alertness, and it also affects cardiovascular health.”

Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday and the clocks must be set back one hour. It lasts until March 9.

Hale said an hour of gain in the fall is preferable to an hour of loss in the spring, while she said there are more adverse effects on the body.

“In the fall, when we fall back, that extra hour usually provides a little more sleep for people who need it, so we don’t really see major health impacts,” Hale said. “But in the spring, when there’s a 23-hour day for one night, people who are already sleep-deprived… become extra injured because they’re already sleep-deprived. During that week, there’s an increase in car accidents, heart attacks and strokes,” she said.

The time change has been the subject of intense national debate.

Legislation has been introduced in both Congress and the New York State Legislature that would make daylight saving time permanent. However, health experts say the standard time should be made permanent.

In 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine released a statement stating that standard time should be fixed year-round, stating: “… daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology – which, due to the effects of delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in diurnal rhythm misalignment, which has been linked in some studies to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and other health risks.

Hale said she also supports permanent standard time. “Number one: it’s better because clock changes disrupt the circadian rhythm of the human body.

Second, she said, “If you have to choose when society gets its light… it’s healthier for individuals to get it earlier in the day because that helps them wake up and reset their circadian rhythm.”