A few years ago, Bill Griesar, an expert in neuroscience at Portland State University, went to Fort Vancouver High School to teach kids about brains.

But classes started at 7:30 and were half empty.

“Kids told us they were trying to go to bed,” Griesar said. “But that’s not how the brain develops. They stare at the ceiling. They wake up at one o’clock in the morning.”

The tendency of young people to stay up late has a biological origin, says Griesar. During the teenage years, children begin to separate from their parents in preparation for building their own adult lives. And what better way to disconnect from your parents than by waking up at different times?

Griesar brought research on the topic to the Vancouver School District, and district leaders moved start times to 8:30 a.m. Griesar tells the story to illustrate how important natural circadian rhythms are for health and well-being.

“Time change is bad for us,” he said.

A study in the journal Current Biology found a 6% increase in fatal crashes after daylight saving time changes.

If we turn our clocks forward or back an hour, as we all do on Sunday mornings, it increases the risk heart disease, stroke and industrial accidents. It could even disrupt agriculture, because crops and animals depend on sunlight to regulate their eating and sleeping.

In recent years, lawmakers in states across the country have proposed time change legislation. A bill in Oregon died during the most recent legislative session. Another in Washington was passed and signed into law in 2019.

But politicians in Washington and many other states made a major misstep in their legislative efforts to make time simpler: They opted to switch to permanent daylight saving time, which the federal government does not allow. If they had chosen to stay on standard time instead, no federal approval would be needed.

Jay Pea, the nonprofit’s president Save standard timesays companies prefer daylight saving time because they think it is better for the economy.

“The whole thing was created as a way to increase shopping,” Pea said. “These are shopping centers. These are restaurants, car dealers. Companies that think that if Americans leave the workplace and see that it is still sunny, they will go shopping. They’re going to play golf. Whereas if you get off work and it’s dark, you probably go home, have dinner and be with your family.”

Pea is located in Arizona, a state that doesn’t need any extra sunshine and hasn’t had daylight saving time since 1968. Other sunny jurisdictions such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam also ignore daylight saving time.

Pea said computers, flight and train schedules are automatically linked to the local time zone, so there are no real problems. But out-of-state calls can be confusing.

“There’s kind of a brief moment of, ‘Which way is this going?’ How did they change their clocks?’” he said. ‘But it’s not our fault. It is the fault of those who change their clocks.”

Another peculiarity of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam is that none of their major cities are on the border of a state that observes daylight saving time. Imagine the problems if Portland and Vancouver used different standards to determine time.

Pea thinks states’ incremental approach to changing their individual time standards is why the effort to end the time changes has been unsuccessful so far. He believes Oregon, Washington and California should coordinate the change.

Daylight saving time was first introduced in the United States in 1918 to conserve energy during World War I. By extending daylight hours, people used less energy to light their homes and businesses, so there was more fuel for the war.

Many people think that changing the clock has something to do with children working on farms. But Pea said this is a myth started in Boston by a newspaper that published a story listing the reasons for daylight saving time.

“And one of them was, ‘If we let farmers harvest their crops an hour earlier in the morning, they will be fresher.’ And of course the farmers said, ‘That’s poppy! That’s crazy!’” Pea said.

There are countless ways in which government-mandated clock changes affect our daily lives.

Rabbi Motti Wilhelm of Chabad SW Portland just printed the prayer schedule for the coming year. The Jewish calendar is based on the phases of the moon and the position of the sun.

Referring to the longest day of the year, Friday, June 20, Wilhelm pointed out that the evening Sabbath begins at 9:03 p.m., quite late for an hour-long service. He said if Oregon simply stuck to standard time, services could start at 8:03 p.m. instead.

“Standard time all year round makes sense because that is the real time. The intention is for the sun to be brightly overhead at noon,” Wilhelm said.

Oregon lawmakers will try again next year to get rid of the time change. In the meantime, enjoy that extra hour in bed on Sunday.