ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.
The United States of America just underwent a really big change last week. And no, it’s not political, or financial or social. It was temporal. On Sunday, March 9, most Americans woke up early when their iPhone alarms went off an hour ahead of time. This is Daylight Saving Time. It’s a period some people celebrate and some people dread, but everybody has to participate in.
And yes, it is Daylight Saving Time, not “savings.” You’re saving time on daylight, not stashing it away in a savings account.
On the first day of the rollover, I wasn’t even aware the change had happened, to be entirely honest. I wake up late on Sundays normally, so when I got up to go to church and the sun was already really high in the sky, I didn’t think anything of it.
I was made much more painfully aware the day after. I was cat sitting for my friends, and the cat eats breakfast really early, at 7 a.m. She swatted me awake, like a cat does, and I went into the kitchen to give her her food. By the time I got back to the living room, which I was crashing on my friend’s couch, the sun was already shining right through this giant glass window my friends have in their living room.
And my body was still used to it being 6 a.m., but at 7 a.m., the light was just creeping over the horizon. So I wasn’t really used to that yet, and the sun would’ve been a lot higher an hour ago. Needless to say, I didn’t end up falling back asleep that day. Everything was thrown out of whack for me.
AKINBOLAJI AKINGBOLA: Standard time, which is what we’re in now, during the winter, that more naturally aligns with our—with most people’s sleep schedules. So, it’s darker sooner. There’s sunlight in the morning, so it’s very easy for us to fall asleep naturally at night and then wake up with the sunlight.
What happens when we spring forward, we’re having more sunlight in the evening and then less sunlight in the morning. So the exact opposite effect happens. So people tend to stay up a little bit later and then have more difficulty waking up in the morning. And so the net effect there is less sleep overall.
LASSITER: Who you just heard from was Dr. Akinbolaji Akingbola, a sleep medicine expert from the University of Minnesota. He says the week after the initial daylight saving change is kind of rough on everybody, but it has the greatest effect on people who are either late to bed, or early to rise.
AKINGBOLA: The majority of the country is either in school or working, so working 9 to 5, going to school 9 to 5. We think about people’s sleep schedule based off of that large population norm.
And some people have a delayed sleep schedule, so they go to sleep later than the average person does. I think the people that are most impacted are the people who are already delayed. I think Daylight Saving Time can delay them further if they’re not being very thoughtful about when they’re going to sleep. And so, they may already be struggling with not enough sleep at baseline if they’re delayed.
LASSITER: But body health isn’t the only thing being affected by this sudden switch in time. There’s this study published in the journal Current Biology that’s being referenced by all the cool neuroscientists these days. Akingbola was actually familiar with it when I brought it up while we were talking. It was a 20-year study on how the shift forward with spring Daylight Saving Time actually increases the amount of fatal auto accidents during the following week. I know, I know, really cheery subject matter.
AKINGBOLA: There are studies that show in that first week, following Daylight Saving Time, there’s an increase in public safety accidents. So, driving accidents in the morning, cardiovascular events, in the following weeks. And again, like I said, I think those things are just primarily all driven by the acute sleep loss.
Whenever we go to sleep, what we’re doing is we’re giving our body the chance to regain alertness to get us through the next day. And so with not enough sleep, and then also with not having adequate sunlight in the morning to help us more quickly become alert, the accidents are just from decreased alertness, decreased vigilance in the morning time.
LASSITER: Now, by this point in the podcast, I’d hope you guys know that I am a college student. And furthermore, I was a college student on spring break during the production of this episode. So both of those rolled together is a recipe for disaster when it comes to sleeping in.
However, most working adults don’t tend to have spring breaks from their jobs (unless you have, like, a really cool boss). For many, this also means taking an early morning commute. During Daylight Saving Time, you may be operating on less sleep, and less sunlight as well ,on your way to work.
That Current Biology study picked up on this, too. Over the course of 20 years that it was conducted, it determined that there’s an approximately 6% increase in fatal car crashes nationwide the week following the spring daylight saving change.
AKINGBOLA: With less sleep, our reaction time, how alert we are, how vigilant we are, how much we’re scanning, how we’re taking in our surroundings, all those sorts of things are diminished.
LASSITER: It was interesting enough reading about this being a nationwide trend, but I was curious to see if Minnesota specifically also saw an uptick in the amount of car crashes after the daylight change. So, being a college student on spring break with nothing but spare time, that’s exactly what I did.
I looked through the Minnesota State Patrol’s website to track Minnesota car crashes as they happened, and that’s exactly what I did in all of the days following the spring daylight change. I took note of when auto accidents were happening, and how.
Okay, so bear with me on this next part, because the timing is about to get a little bit strange. But there were no accidents, period, the morning of the roll forward. In fact, there was only one reported accident that day, and it happened at night, not in the morning. However, the next morning—that same morning, by the way, that I was struggling to fall asleep because of what the cat did to me—there were two reported accidents that had occurred within 20 minutes of each other. The first happened at 9:21, and the second was at 9:38.
These accidents happened at around halfway past nine, but their bodies didn’t know that. To them, they were still operating on the internal schedule of it being around 8:30, not 9:30. And you see this trend continuing as the days go on.
There was another crash on Tuesday morning at 8:37, which somebody’s internal clock might have told them was 7:37. One on Wednesday at 7:36, which would have been 6:36. Then two more, this time within five minutes of each other on Wednesday—one at 7:53 (or 6:53) and the other at 7:58 (or 6:58). Again, these people may have been driving at a slightly later time, but their bodies may have been telling them that it was still an hour earlier.
It is important to note as well that there were no crashes on Thursday or Friday. Fortunately, also, none of these morning accidents were fatal and they only resulted in injuries. Before the daylight saving change, most accidents happened in the afternoon or the evening unless they were a result of that inclement weather that we had a few weeks back.
This could have been just a wild coincidence, because these crashes weren’t the only ones happening during the day, but I couldn’t help seem to notice that the pattern of increased crashes in the morning seemed to line up exactly with the Current Biology study.
To see if I could find some more answers on this, I reached out to Sergeant Troy Christianson of the Minnesota State Patrol. I was hoping I could talk to one of the responding officers to see if this was a pattern they noticed frequently, or even to see if I could find out more about the circumstances of some of these crashes that had happened in the past few days. He declined the request for an interview.
TROY CHRISTIANSON: They’re both active investigations, so I can’t make any comment on either one.
LASSITER: How much detail are you able to provide?
CHRISTIANSON: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing until they’re closed.
LASSITER: The Minnesota Department of Public Safety also wasn’t able to help me out. So without that extra data, my theory remains just that, a theory.
Although I will say, according to the Current Biology study, the largest increase in crashes is seen during the week of the Daylight Saving Time change, in the morning particularly (between 4 and 8 a.m.). This lines up pretty closely with what we in Minnesota saw in the reported accidents during this time period.
AKINGBOLA: The thought is more accidents in the morning, after less sleep. And then also, the sunlight in the morning is also very helpful in making us become more alert. And so those combinations of things being absent, I think are some of the things that contribute to the fact that there’s more accidents in the morning.
LASSITER: So, what does that mean? Should we just get rid of Daylight Saving Time as a whole?
AKINGBOLA: If we think about it in a more broad public safety viewpoint, it’s not just with car accidents where this decreased sleep time where people are at risk. We also know, for instance, that school-age children who have earlier start times are, in essence, having less sleep. There is an increased risk for school age children in things like major depression and suicide.
I think that question is a little bit easier to answer. Is it worth it? I would say so. Whether it’s less depression in our children, less suicide in our children, less car accidents in the adulting population. So I think those sorts of things definitely would make it worth it in the grand total.
LASSITER: And I know. I know, this can also seem like a lot of big, scary things being thrown at you all at once. But Akingbola reminds us that the most important thing to remember is…
AKINGBOLA: While we know that there are risks associated with Daylight Saving Time, less sleep, sleep deprivation, I also don’t want patients to be so alarmed where they become so fixated on their sleep. I think that becoming so hyper aware of your sleep can also make getting sleep difficult.
I always tell my patients, you know, taking a big step back. All like you have to do this, you have to do that, like all those things. There’s a lot of things that we should do, we shouldn’t do. But if you’re able to fall asleep, stay asleep, wake up, feel rested, whatever it is that you can do to make that happen.
LASSITER: Daylight Saving Time is a big change for a lot of people around the country. And yeah, especially in the spring, it’s got a lot of negative effects. That Current Biology study went out of its way to emphasize that the changes we see in the spring, aren’t seen when we gain an hour back in the fall. So “springing ahead” can be a lot more daunting than “falling behind.” But if you just prepare yourself one day at a time, you’ll wake up feeling refreshed enough to enjoy those extended evenings.
This episode was written by Alex Lassiter, and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we appreciate you listening in. So please feel free to send an email to the [email protected] inbox with any questions, comments, concerns or story ideas that you want us to produce this next season. I’m Alex Lassiter, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.
