Daylight Savings Time (DST) commences again this weekend for most of the United States and several countries around the world. In writing this post I became curious about who all goes through this yearly practice and, as it turns out, several countries either never adopted it or ceased observing it at some point along the way, which I found statistically interesting.
I won’t bore you with the many arguments pro and con around DST, but can state I am not a big fan of “losing” an hour of sleep each year. Billions of people ritualistically change their clocks each spring and fall, year after year, and throw themselves off for a bit until they adapt. The funny thing about it is that “time” doesn’t really exist; we are always in the “present time” and our clocks simply provide a form of measurement…but that is a whole other conversation.
Anyway, folks are generally instructed to change their clocks on a Saturday night. A good bit of the population works Monday through Friday, thus making that first Monday morning following the change particularly bothersome. Well, here’s the thing – you don’t have to wait until Saturday night to make the change! Years ago a very wise family member suggested we move our clocks forward Friday evening instead. In doing this, 5:00 pm magically becomes 6:00 pm, dinner is consumed on the earlier side and bedtime commences an hour earlier. Do we wind up forcing ourselves to do this? Yes, maybe just a wee bit, but for our family it really does take the edge off of that Monday morning because our bodies are already starting to adapt! If you have weekend activities, appointments and the like you of course have to be more mindful, and your cell phone will be telling you what time the rest of the world is on, but hey, time doesn’t really exist, remember??? It’s actually kind of fun in a way to get the head start – like you are in your own personal time machine/blanket fort. “We’re already an hour ahead – yay us!” Sometimes it’s the little things, right? Suffice it to say, it is okay to be different; to do your own thing for your health and wellbeing. You don’t always have to follow the crowd – whether it is DST, or something else. By the time you read this it’ll be too late to give it a try this go round, but if it resonates you may want to try it on for size next year. Create your own time machine/blanket fort. You can be cool like that!