On Sunday, clocks across the UK will go forward by an hour – except mine. Since October 2018, I have been living my life entirely by GMT. It may sound extreme (and inconvenient) but I do it because I believe that daylight savings time (DST) is an unnecessary bane on our society; a failed experiment long in need of terminating.
For a start, changing the clocks is bad for our health. This is because we humans (and many other lifeforms on this planet) are synchronised with Earth’s natural orbit – we naturally wake up when the day begins and sleep when night falls. Changing our “social clock” creates a gulf between the time on our watches and the height of the sun in the sky. (This was made even worse during the second world war, when British double summer time was introduced, time-shifting the natural day by two hours instead of one.) In 2019, a group of experts in psychology, neurology and sleep cycles concluded that “if we want to improve human health … we should abandon DST”, after studies showed that, in the weeks after a clock change, sleep durations fall and heart attacks increase. There is a strong safety case, too: when DST was paused as an experiment in the 1960s, road traffic accidents in England and Wales fell by 11%.
Personally, I have struggled with maintaining consistent sleeping patterns for most of my life, and my learning disability (Asperger syndrome) and sensitivity to change makes the transition even more difficult. Keeping my clocks on GMT since 2018 has improved my sleep and has made me a slightly less nervous person, as I now know that the day is progressing as it should instead of being artificially rewound or fast-forwarded. When I have to keep an appointment between April and October, basic arithmetic is enough to translate it into my time zone.
I founded the anti daylight saving time movement Hora Solaris (“solar time” in Latin), because I am convinced that DST can no longer be allowed to exist and must be abolished in not just the UK, but every country implementing it. Indeed, earlier this month, the US Senate voted to put an end to the changing of the clocks by making daylight savings time permanent. The European parliament voted to scrap the hour change in 2019 (and a poll showed that a majority of EU citizens agreed) but the bill was then mired in bureaucracy and hasn’t been implemented.
In the UK, my anti-DST activism has been met with both support and derision. Some see my efforts as a form of subtle heroism, and follow my example of “freezing” their clocks in one of the two time zones; while others consider them a thorn in society’s side.
The original purposes of DST, it seems, were to encourage people to spend longer outdoors and to promote productivity in factories and on farms, but the practice has failed to live up to the theory. The former was the initial justification made by William Willett, a chief proponent of the DST movement in the United Kingdom and one of the key figureheads of the “spring forward/fall back” routine, after he witnessed too many closed windows and people indoors during a ride in the countryside on a warm sunny day.
Our flip-flopping between time zones must be phased out – it has failed to serve its intended purpose. It stands to reason that if a policy or tradition does not function as expected, we should either revise it to increase efficiency, or revoke it entirely.
It is my fond hope that this will be the last year in which people are forced to compromise their health for the sake of this cursed tradition. Once GMT returns this October, it is my wish that it be the last ever “fall back” moment. Until then, I will keep on marking the time in my own special way.
• Stefano Pavone is a writer and the founder of Hora Solaris, an anti-daylight savings movement
