From today’s No S**t Sherlock Department — A study has found that daylight savings time disrupts the sleep cycle. I heard this on National Public Radio while driving back to the office this afternoon. Dr. Stanley Spiesel, who writes a medical column for Slate, said during the NPR interview that a study of Central Europeans “showed that the normal correlation between dawn and the sleep cycle becomes disrupted during the transition to daylight-saving time.”
Spiesel goes on to say that getting into the natural brightness of the day is the best way to rebound from the grogs that beset you when transitioning to daylight savings time. How to rebound completely from the other types of grogs, other than with the hair of the grog, continues to baffle medical science.
I found that the best way to make the time transitions after the clocks are set backward or forward is to do so while you are on vacation. Some 12 years ago I was on vacation, staying with my friend Sally in Massachusetts. Even though she had to get up to go to work and I had to drive with her so that I could use her car while she was at work, I found I didn’t suffer from the normal irritation of time transitioning when I returned to my job the following week. The fact that I made the transition from daylight to standard time in the Eastern Time Zone rather than in the Central Time Zone where I live may have somehow contributed to making the time change more bearable. But I think that not working and not really having much in the way of responsibility contributes the most to surviving the change from daylight to standard or from standard to daylight. I think not working helps in many ways. I think that even not thinking about working can be helpful. So I will quit thinking (and writing) about work. I am feeling better already.