Daylight savings time (DST) has ended in Europe and will end this weekend in much of North America. As it's early in the new term here in the UK and this blog may get occasional check-ins from students, I felt it worthwhile to remind us all of the fact that the start and end of DST is basically a great international experiment on the health effects of sleep. Each year at the start of daylight savings, when we go into summer time and lose an hour of sleep, participating countries witness a small, but significant increase in heart attacks in the following days, as well as a slight increase in the number of road accidents. Conversely, these same metrics show a slight but significant decrease when daylight savings time ends. The start of DST basically nudges the population into a kind of short-journey jet lag, moving us suddenly into the next time zone and denying us an hour of sleep. Perhaps most interesting is the peak response to this one-hour shift is about two to three days after put our clocks forward. Just that one hour of adjustment is having an effect days later in our week. This is one of the reasons why I continually stress to students (but also friends and colleagues) to take their sleep seriously! Students in their 20s are probably unconcerned with heart attacks, but there is evidence that the students with the consistent sleep habits tend to perform best overall in their studies. There is a lot more to investigate about this relationship (there are certainly confounding factors that can be at play), but there's a healthy amount of common sense experience to back this up. We all know we are less functional the next day after a poor night's slumber, but erratic shifts in our day-to-day sleeping habits can be taking a longer-term toll. You'll make more silly mistakes in the lab, be less effective in retaining information, but it can take days or weeks to correct things. Data like the plot shown above remind us how important sleep really is.
0 Comments
|
Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
December 2022
Categories
All
|