As people in the U.S. prepare to set their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 12, 2023, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time.

About one-third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these twice-yearly time changes. And nearly two-thirds would like to eliminate them completely, compared to 21% who aren’t sure and 16% who would like to keep moving their clocks back and forth.

But the effects go beyond simple inconvenience. Researchers are discovering that “springing ahead” each March is connected with serious negative health effects, including an uptick in heart attacks and teen sleep deprivation. In contrast, the fall transition back to standard time is not associated with these health effects, as my co-authors and I noted in a 2020 commentary.

I’ve studied the pros and cons of these twice-annual rituals for more than five years as a professor of neurology and pediatrics and the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s sleep division. It’s become clear to me and many of my colleagues that the transition to daylight saving time each spring affects health immediately after the clock change and also for the nearly eight months that Americans remain on daylight saving time.

The strong case for permanent standard time

Americans are split on whether they prefer permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time.

However, the two time shifts – jolting as they may be – are not equal. Standard time most closely approximates natural light, with the sun directly overhead at or near noon. In contrast, during daylight saving time from March until November, the clock change resulting from daylight saving time causes natural light to be present one hour later in the morning and one hour later in the evening according to clock time.

Morning light is essential for helping to set the body’s natural rhythms: It wakes us up and improves alertness. Morning light also boosts mood – light boxes simulating natural light are prescribed for morning use to treat seasonal affective disorder.

Although the exact reasons why light activates us and benefits our mood are not yet known, this may be due to light’s effects on increasing levels of cortisol, a hormone that modulates the stress response or the effect of light on the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions.

Adolescents also may be chronically sleep deprived due to school, sports and social activities. For instance, many children start school around 8 a.m. or earlier. This means that during daylight saving time, many young people get up and travel to school in pitch darkness.

The body of evidence makes a good case for adopting permanent standard time nationwide, as I testified at a March 2022 Congressional hearing and argued in a recent position statement for the Sleep Research Society. The American Medical Association recently called for permanent standard time. And in late 2022, Mexico adopted permanent standard time,, citing benefits to health, productivity and energy savings.

The biggest advantage of daylight saving time is that it provides an extra hour of light in the late afternoon or evening, depending on time of year, for sports, shopping or eating outside. However, exposure to light later into the evening for almost eight months during daylight saving time comes at a price. This extended evening light delays the brain’s release of melatonin, the hormone that promotes drowsiness, which in turn interferes with sleep and causes us to sleep less overall.

Because puberty also causes melatonin to be released later at night, meaning that teenagers have a delay in the natural signal that helps them fall asleep, adolescents are particularly susceptible to sleep problems from the extended evening light. This shift in melatonin during puberty lasts into our 20s.

The ‘western edge’ effect

Geography can also make a difference in how daylight saving time affects people. One study showed that people living on the western edge of a time zone, who get light later in the morning and later in the evening, got less sleep than their counterparts on the eastern edge of a time zone.

This study found that western-edge residents had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and breast cancer, as well as lower per capita income and higher health care costs. Other research has found that rates of certain other cancers are higher on the western edge of a time zone.

Scientists believe that these health problems may result from a combination of chronic sleep deprivation and “circadian misalignment.” Circadian misalignment refers to a mismatch in timing between our biological rhythms and the outside world. In other words, the timing of daily work, school or sleep routines is based on the clock, rather than on the sun’s rise and set.

A brief history of daylight saving time

Congress instituted year-round daylight saving time during World War I and World War II, and once again during the energy crisis of the early 1970s.

The idea was that having extra light later into the afternoon would save energy by decreasing the need for electric lighting. This idea has since been proved largely inaccurate, as heating needs may increase in the morning in the winter, while air conditioning needs can also increase in the late afternoon in the summer.

Another pro-daylight saving argument has been that crime rates drop with more light at the end of the day. While this has been proved true, the change is very small, and the health effects appear to outweigh the benefits to society from lower rates of crime.

After World War II, designating the start and end dates for daylight saving time fell to state governments. Because this created many railroad scheduling and safety problems, however, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966. This law set the nationwide dates of daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October. In 2007, Congress amended the act to expand the period in which daylight saving time is in effect from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November – dates that remain in effect today.

The Uniform Time Act allows states and territories to opt out of daylight saving time, however. Arizona and Hawaii are on permanent standard time, along with Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and American Samoa.

Now, many other states are considering whether to stop falling back and springing ahead. Several U.S. states have legislation and resolutions under consideration to support permanent standard time, while many others have been or are considering permanent daylight saving time. Legislation and resolutions for permanent standard time have increased from 15% in 2021 to 31% in 2023.

In March 2022, the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act in a bid to make daylight saving time permanent. But the House did not move forward with this legislation. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio reintroduced the bill on March 1, 2023.

The spike in activity among states seeking to break from these twice-yearly changes reflects how more people are recognizing the downsides of this practice. Now, it’s up to legislators to decide whether we end the time shift altogether, and to choose permanent standard or daylight saving time.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 10, 2022.

Beth Ann Malow, Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

President Joe Biden will convene world leaders beginning on March 29, 2023, to discuss the state of democracies around the world.

The Summit for Democracy, a virtual event being co-hosted by the White House, is being touted as an opportunity to “reflect, listen and learn” with the aim of encouraging “democratic renewal.”

As political scientists, we have been doing something very similar. In the fall of 2022 we listened to thousands of U.S. residents about their views on the state of American democracy. What we found was that, despite widespread fears over the future of democracy, many people are also hopeful, and that hope translated into “voting for democracy” by shunning election result deniers at the polls.

Our study – and indeed Biden’s stated push for democracy – comes at a unique point in American political history.

As a group, we have decades of experience studying politics and believe that not since the American Civil War has there been so much concern that American democracy, while always a work in progress, is under threat. Survey trends point to eroding trust in democratic institutions. And in addition to serving as a direct reminder of our political system’s fragility, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol provoked concern of the potential of democratic backsliding in the U.S.

Fears of a failing democracy

The 2022 midterms were the first nationwide ballot to take place after the Jan. 6 attack. The vote provided a good opportunity to check in with potential U.S. voters over how they viewed the risks to democracy.

As such, in the fall of 2022, the African American Research Collaborative – of which one of us is a member – worked with a team of partners to create the Midterm Election Voter Poll. In an online and phone survey, we asked more than 12,000 U.S. voters from a variety of backgrounds a series of questions about voting intention and trust in national politics. Respondents were also quizzed over their concern about the state of American democracy.

On a five-point scale ranging from “very” to “not at all,” the survey asked how worried respondents were that: “The political system in the United States is failing and there is a decent chance that we will no longer have a functioning democracy within the next 10 years.”

Roughly 6 in 10 Americans expressed fear that democracy is in peril, with 35% saying they were “very worried.”

Broken down by race and ethnicity, white Americans were the most concerned, with 64% expressing some worry that democracy is in peril. Black and Latino Americans were slightly less concerned. Asian Americans appeared the least worried, with 55% expressing concern.

Of the 63% of respondents who registered concern, more than half said they were “very worried” that democracy is in trouble and that it may soon come to an end.

Such fragility-of-democracy concerns can have a self-perpetuating effect; voters’ increasing lack of faith in their system can hasten the collapse in government they fear.

For example, negative attitudes about democracy can also destabilize voting habits – prompting some to skip elections altogether while motivating others to swing back and forth between candidates and political parties from one election to another. This pattern of voting can, in turn, lead to gridlock in government or worse: the election of cynical politicians who are less able – or even willing – to govern. It is a process that former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts described in 2015 as the “self-fulfilling prophesy of ‘government doesn’t work.’”

Turning hope into action

But the story that emerged from our survey isn’t all doom and gloom.

In addition to confirming how endangered Americans believe their democracy is, citizens appear hopeful that their political system can recover. When given the prompt: “Overall, as you vote in November 2022, are you mostly feeling …,” more than 40% of the respondents – regardless of race or ethnicity – said they felt “hopeful.”

Indeed, “hope” was by far the most common feeling out of the four emotions that respondents were able to choose from. “Worry” was the second most typical emotion, with 31% of the total sample selecting it, followed by “pride” and “anger.”

Rather than resigning themselves to a lost democracy, the results indicate that voters from a broad array of demographic and political backgrounds feel hopeful that American democracy can overcome the challenges facing the nation.

Black Americans were among the most hopeful (49%), second only to Asian Americans (55%), while white Americans were the most worried (33%). These racial and ethnic differences are consistent with recent research on how emotions can shape politics.

The results also make sense in the context of the trajectory of race relations in the U.S. Black people have borne the brunt of what happens when authoritarian forces in this country have prevailed. They have suffered firsthand from anti-democratic actions being used against them, depriving them of the right to vote, for example. Throughout U.S. history, stories of racial progress often reveal a struggle to reconcile feelings of hope and worry – particularly when thinking about what America is versus what the nation ought to be.

Such hope in democracy has turned into action. Efforts to counter GOP-led attempts to suppress votes are encouraging signs of citizens combating anti-democratic measures, while punishing parties deemed to be pushing them.

Take the example of Georgia, which has “flipped from Republican to Democrat” in large part because of voting rights activist and Democratic politician Stacey Abrams’ tireless mobilization efforts. In the midterm election, GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker underperformed among Black voters, winning less of the Black vote than GOP candidates in other states.

The breaking of the Republican stronghold in Georgia fits with a broader theme of Black voters casting ballots to “save democracy,” as scholars writing for the Brookings Institution think tank put it. In rejecting anti-democratic measures – and representatives of the party held responsible – in Georgia, “Black people were the solution for an authentic democracy.”

Black women deserve the most credit here, consistently voting for pro-democracy candidates. Not surprisingly, when broken down by race and gender, our survey shows that Black women are most hopeful (56%), some way ahead of white men (43%), with Black men and white women both at 42%.

A democracy, to keep for good.

Democracy has long been a cherished ideal in the U.S. – but one that from the country’s founding was perceived to be fragile.

When asked what sort of political system the Founding Fathers had agreed upon during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin famously replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

While acknowledging that the success of our government isn’t promised, Franklin’s words serve as a reminder that citizens must work relentlessly to maintain and protect what the Constitution provides. What we’ve discovered, both from our survey and from how people voted, is that Americans are sending a clear message that they support democracy, and will fight anti-democratic measures – something that politicians of all parties might benefit from listening to if we want to keep our republic.

Ray Block Jr, Brown-McCourtney Career Development Professor in the McCourtney Institute and associate professor of political science and African American studies, Penn State; Andrene Wright, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn State, and Mia Angelica Powell, PhD Student in Department of Political Science, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.