Daylight saving time can affect your health

It is that time of year again, we are about to lose an hour from our day to accommodate daylight-saving time. Sunday, March 9, we are all supposed to wake up thinking it's an hour later than it really is. Have you ever wondered if losing an hour of sleep or for that matter an hour from your day affects your health or fitness? For me daylight-saving time has an impact that takes me a couple of days to recover from. I find it interesting that I fall back nicely every November to standard time without skipping a beat.

How did daylight saving time originate? Depending on who you believe, it was ether introduced by our most famous U.S. inventor and great statesman Ben Franklin or an Englishman named William Willett. It seems that in fact Willett was the first to bring the idea of moving the clocks forward into popularity.

Now, I do not want the truth to get in the way of a good story, so it is told that Willett was an avid golfer and didn't like his round of golf getting cut short due to darkness so he convinced the British parliament and the world to adopt the practice of daylight saving time. Since golf is great exercise, I guess it qualifies as a good reason. The odd fact here is even though England came up with the idea of daylight-saving time, it was Germany who first started the practice during the first World War.

Does daylight savingtime have a negative impact on your health? Some studies have tried to link depression and insomnia to the seasonal change of springing forward an hour. But it all comes down to your circadian rhythm which your brain and body establishes within a 24-hour cycle. This 24-hour cycle is tied to plants, animals and humans. The physiological processes of our circadian rhythms help us set our sleeping and eating patterns. Circadian rhythms regulate body temperature, digestive function along with hormone production and cell regeneration on a daily cycle to keep living beings healthy.

When your circadian rhythms are disrupted it can have a dramatic effect on some people in the form of mood swings, fatigue and for athletes it can impact energy levels and overall performance for a short time. In your brain you have an area called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN is your brain's time keeper and can get out of sync during a 24-hour period.

Within each 24-hour period your brain and body need to undergo small adjustments to keep our body on schedule with our day and night environment. This circadian regulation can be affected by age, illnesses, nutrition, exercise and of course daylight saving time.

As the name suggests circadian rhythms are a cycle of high points and low points. When people, including athletes, have this cycle change it can reduce your daily performance peaks by as much as 10 percent, which for some can be debilitating for work, play and exercise. So does daylight-saving time impact your health? I think it is fair to say that to some degree we are all impaired by the loss of an hour in our day. The good news, it is short-lived and within a day or so we all recover our daily rhythm. What can we expect come Monday morning? A large number of tired and somewhat foggy brained people heading to work or the gym with sunrise running an hour late.

I for one would prefera permanent move to daylight saving time. In the United States, Arizona and Hawaii do not observe daylight saving time and parts of China, Argentina, Iceland and Russia have adopted daylight saving time as their standard time. It seems odd that in this day and age, we need two time options. And yes I understand agriculture may need more time to work the crops so just pick daylight-saving time and stick with it through the year. I am sure we could come up with a number of very good reasons to establish permanent daylight saving in Idaho, not the least of which would be a healthier rhythm of life.

Judd Jones is a director for the Hagadone Corporation.