When social clocks are out of alignment with the solar clock, people experience what’s called “social jet lag.” As Erin Flynn-Evans and Cassie Hilditch wrote for the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms last year, there is mounting evidence that social jet lag has serious health effects, including short sleep duration, increased metabolic disorders, cardiovascular problems, mood disorders and even reduced life expectancy and increased risk of cancer. “Believe it or not, having light in the morning actually not only makes you feel more alert but helps you go to bed at the right time at night,” Beth Malow, director of the sleep division of Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine, told Kaiser Health News last year. Today, Standard Time is in effect now for only about four months, between November and March. While the division between the two time systems was equal at first, Daylight Time has over the decades come to rule a bigger and bigger share of the year. (Arizona and Hawaii remain holdout states.) The change was initially unpopular, however, and wouldn’t become permanent until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which established Daylight Time throughout most of the country. In March of 1918, Congress enacted the Standard Time Act, which both defined the country’s time zones and temporarily instituted the clock change. Soon, England and much of the rest of Europe followed suit, as did the United States.
![when change clocks when change clocks](https://theridgewoodblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Screen-Shot-2012-11-01-at-11.27.01-AM.png)
“While the British were talking about it year after year, the Germans decided to do it more or less by fiat,” David Prerau, author of “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time,” explained to National Geographic in 2019. In 1916, the German government embraced moving the clocks forward as a means of saving energy. It wasn’t until World War I, though, that the idea gained serious political momentum. The origins of Daylight Time are often traced back to Benjamin Franklin, who in a 1784 satirical essay suggested that the city of Paris could save millions of pounds of candle wax every year if Parisians woke up earlier in the morning and went to bed earlier at night. Why do we change our clocks in the first place?