Time to sleep in and ponder

It is upon us. Again.

Every year twice a year since the Great War, we participate in the ritual of changing time.

These days most things are done for us; when we wake Sunday morning and look at our phones we’ll see the time has been moved back one hour, we’ll happily close our eyes and collapse back onto the pillow, lingering beneath the sheet and blankets hoping to catch an extra hour of sleep. (Some of us may sigh happily, realizing that the following day we have an extra hour of slumber before heading off to work).

Only the fastidious will have set their timepieces back one hour before they went to sleep Saturday night. The rest of us will stumble about, manually adjusting our wristwatches or puzzling over the clock on the car dashboard: “Did the car set itself or do I have to reset the time? How do I do this?”

The end of daylight saving time on the first Sunday in November (it used to be October until 2007) puts us back in standard time until the second Sunday in March, when we “spring ahead” and our timekeepers move up one hour.
That we spend more than half the year in an altered precept of time which prompts us to consider what real time is. Is it the hours we keep from spring through fall or those kept during winter?

But the philosophical question gives way to more real concerns.

In 2014 a report indicated that switching over to daylight saving time — jumping ahead one hour — raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 percent. The same report pointed out that generally most heart attacks occur on a Monday possibly because of the stress of starting the work week.

On the other hand, the occurrence of heart attacks appear to diminish by 21 percent the week following the “fall back” period, when clocks are set one hour behind.

Why do we subject ourselves to this mental and physical peril? What do we gain out of the simple exercise of fiddling with the hours and minutes of our clocks and watches and laptops and phones?

The time change, as most school kids can tell you, was first introduced by Benjamin Franklin — who evidently had a lot of time on his hands — as a way of conserving energy and making the most of farmable daylight hours. It was not implemented until World War I in an effort to save energy, the thinking being that the less time spent indoors the less energy wasted on indoor lighting and diverted, instead, to the war effort.

Over time people have equated longer daylight hours as time spent outdoors and living a healthier lifestyle. Good thing too, since most people gain a few pounds during the colder, winter and holiday months.

But maybe the best thing to come out of the spring ahead/fall back ritual we go through twice a year is it nudges us into pausing to consider, where does the time go? And are we using it wisely?