What did you do with the hour you gained last week? (DW#695)
In North America and Western Europe, the end of October/beginning of November signals the switch back from Daylight Saving Time. The clocks go back and we "gain an hour" on Sunday.
While many of us cringe at the coming of Winter and the shorter, darker days, there is a significant statistic that we need to be aware of:
"In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after", writes Mathew Walker inWhy we Sleep.
He explains that the opposite is also true of course. Here is how he puts it:
"When communicating science to the general public in lectures or writing, I’m always wary of bombarding an audience with never-ending mortality and morbidity statistics, lest they themselves lose the will to live in front of me. It is hard not to do so with such compelling masses of studies in the field of sleep deprivation. Often, however, a single astonishing result is all the people need to apprehend the point. For cardiovascular health, I believe that finding comes from a ‘global experiment’ in which 1.5 billion people are forced to reduce their sleep by one hour or less for a single night each year. It is very likely that you have been part of this experiment, otherwise known as daylight savings time.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day".
He goes on to say that it is not such heart attacks that fall and rise with the gain and loss of an hour of sleep:"A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and micro-sleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but."
If these stats are beginning to worry you, they should. How many of us are losing that hour of sleep not just once a year but several times a week?!
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