There is a clear consensus that everybody hates setting the clocks ahead and losing sleep. There seems to be movement toward doing away with this dumb tradition and going towards all daylight savings time all year. But at least one scientist says the evidence points toward going all standard time all year.

• There is evidence for increased strokes, heart attacks, and sleep deprivation during daylight saving time, the latter particularly affecting teenagers. There is also evidence of increased obesity, diabetes, cancer, lower income and higher health care costs in the western portions of time zones, where the shift in dawn and dusk is most pronounced.
• The lack of morning light disrupts the body’s natural rhythms when we are trying to wake up.
• Increased light in the evening makes it harder to fall asleep. This is particularly hard on adolescents and young adults, who have trouble falling asleep already for biological reasons and often have to wake up early for school, leading to chronic sleep deprivation affecting their already wacked-out bodies and minds.
• Standard time is a better match for the natural rhythm of the sun, with the sun directly overhead around noon.

I would add that the time shift causes trouble in science and other technical fields, where we try to measure stuff over time and make sense of it. It also causes practical problems for people who have to travel or collaborate with colleagues across time zones (which is already challenging). Once I got a roomful of people together at 7 a.m. in Singapore for a meeting led by U.S. staff, only to find that the U.S. had changed its clocks the night before and the meeting was over. Those people were a little mad at me. I bought them doughnuts. A lesson learned there is to let your calendar software handle time zones and not try to do the math yourself. The U.S. is not even the worst – Australia has half-hour time shifts that are different in different cities not that far apart. The time shift is dumb, let’s just stop doing it.