rewrite this title The Health Impact of Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Want to meet some smart Canadians? Head to Kootenay, a mountainous region in southeast British Columbia—specifically to the town of Creston. On March 8, most of North America and Europe, along with some Caribbean and Central American Countries, will move their clocks one hour forward and commence Daylight Saving Time (DST). But as the Canadian Broadcasting Company reports, unlike those other places, once the move is made, British Columbia will stick with the change, not going back to Standard Time next fall.

“We are done waiting. British Columbia is going to change our clocks just one more time—and then never again,” said the province’s Premier David Eby in his March 1 announcement.

The little town of Creston, however, is opting out—abiding by a local tradition of sticking with Standard Time year-round, “without any hassle” of the twice-a-year clock change, says the Explore Creston Valley website. And I, in turn, say bravo Creston.

DST—not to put too fine a point on it—is a scourge, a time when clocks align with the will of the legislatures that make the laws, but not with the more compelling cycles of the sun and our bodies. It’s a season when we wake up in the dark, before dawn has broken, and then must suffer interminable evenings when the sun—like a dinner guest who has lingered long past the cigars and port—is still hanging about. DST has been associated with increased episodes of unipolar and bipolar depression, higher rates of ischemic stroke, more workplace injuries and traffic accidents, and more cases of obesity.

“We go from Standard Time, which is more aligned with the sun, to daylight saving time, and we see a lot of negative things that happen afterwards,” says Dr. Karin Johnson, professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine-Baystate and chair of the Coalition for Permanent Standard Time, which is associated with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). “[There are] a lot of bad outcomes, and people just don’t like it.”

The polling reflects that. DST is admittedly wildly popular in British Columbia—with 93% of respondents approving of it year-round. Turkey has also adopted DST throughout the year. But those two are decided outliers.

According to the Pew Research Center, only about a third of countries around the world observe DST at all—most of them in North America and Europe. One 2018 survey by the European Commission reported a whopping 84% disapproval rating for DST across the continent. In the U.S., a 2025 Gallup poll found a smaller but still significant majority of 54% supporting the abolition of DST in favor of year-round Standard Time. 

The AASM is in agreement with the DST opponents. In a 2020 position paper published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the group said, “​​An abundance of accumulated evidence indicates that the acute transition from standard time to Daylight Saving Time incurs significant public health and safety risks…It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favor of a fixed, national, year-round Standard Time.”

It’s those risks to health that provide the biggest arguments against DST. A Sept. 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, found that permanent Standard Time would lower the U.S. prevalence of obesity by 0.78% (or 2.6 million cases) and of stroke by 0.09% (or 300,000). A 2018 paper in the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine found up to a 29% increase in heart attacks following the switch to DST. The problem is that messing with the time also messes with our circadian rhythms—which disrupts virtually every system in the body. 

“We’re changing the clocks but we’re not changing the signals our body aligns to,” says Johnson. 

Those signals are set by the rising and setting of the sun, and it’s when we’re on standard time that dawn most aligns with the time we wake up and dusk most aligns with when we’re readying for bed. This can throw off our sleep cycles, which in turn leads to inflammation and hormone dysregulation, and increases in the stress hormone known as cortisol. That causes cardiac, metabolic, and other downstream health effects. And it’s not just in the few days surrounding the clock change—when we would presumably be getting adjusted to darker mornings and brighter evenings—that our bodies feel the effects; our circadian system struggles throughout the entire season.

“Months after,” says Johnson, “hormone levels have adjusted a little, but they’re still closer to Standard Time.” Mental health can be affected too, with the Pennsylvania-based Cognitive Behavior Institute reporting that symptoms of anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder all increase following the time shift.

There’s a certain measure of bait-and-switch in DST too, particularly when it comes to traffic safety. One of the common arguments for turning clocks forward in the spring is that it creates an hour more of daylight in the evening, making the roads safer for people driving home from work or going out in the early evening. But the change also means darker mornings for people commuting to their jobs. And disrupted sleep can spell distracted or fatigued driving. One Spanish study published in the journal Epidemiology found a startling 30% increase in fatal car accidents from 1990 to 2014 on the day clocks sprang forward. 

Workplace errors, particularly in hospitals, are associated with DST distraction as well. A 2020 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that medical errors such as administering the wrong medication to patients increased up to 8.8% in the seven days following the switch to DST. “Writing the wrong prescription or [caregivers] sticking themselves with needles are definitely increased if people aren’t getting enough sleep or good quality sleep,” says Johnson.

Another promise of DST proponents—that more daylight hours will lead to reduced energy consumption due to less energy burned lighting homes and businesses—has fallen flat too. The rising popularity of LED bulbs—which use 75% less energy than incandescent bulbs—means lighting is making up a smaller and smaller share of the nation’s energy budget, making DST gains negligible. Meanwhile, additional hours of daylight lead to increased air conditioning use—something that is especially concerning as climate change raises mean temperatures, especially during daylight hours. Hawaii and Arizona are the only U.S. states that don’t observe DST, and in the case of Arizona, the move came in an attempt to keep those cooling costs down. The state’s air conditioning costs are lower than neighboring states that do observe DST, according to Johnson.

For now it doesn’t look like the rest of the U.S. is ready to follow most of the rest of the world and get off the DST train. In December 2024, then-President-elect Donald Trump announced in a Truth Social post that the Republican Party would endeavor to end DST, calling it “inconvenient, and very costly to our nation.” But once in the White House he labeled it a “50-50” issue and backed away from ending the annual clock change. Since 2018, Congress has regularly taken up the Sunshine Protection Act, which would follow British Columbia’s lead and enshrine DST nationwide and year-round—but the bill has never cleared both chambers of Congress and made it to the president’s desk for a signature. Nineteen state legislatures have laws on the books making similar provisions, but the Uniform Time Act of 1966 prevents those measures from taking effect without the consent of the federal government.