By: Thomas Horvath

We have now entered into daylight saving time of the year, and I, along with many others, are not thrilled. I’m not a farmer, so I can’t speak on how much it helps them (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t help them at all), but it’s doing all other Americans no favors. In this article, I will explain why daylight savings should be discarded.

Losing an hour of sleep is already pretty bad, but this schedule change has been shown to have negative effects. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, our internal clocks are not programmed to be shifted by an hour, and this shift can lead to higher chances of health issues, such as heart attacks. According to CBS News,  daylight savings has also been shown to have more workplace injuries, likely due to everyone being sleepy when heading to work. With this, waking up when it’s dark out can lead to higher rates of depression, as a lack of sunlight will affect your mental health, and with daylight savings, you will be awake in the dark and wake up to the dark more often than normal. And the myth of farmers needing daylight savings could not be further from the truth. The loss of sunlight in the morning throws off not only the farmers but also the cattle. 

I hope I’ve illustrated my problems with daylight savings and why it’s not needed for this country anymore and arguably never was. There are no pros to daylight savings, and it’s more harmful than helpful to the American citizen. By keeping daylight savings we are messing with our natural autonomy and increasing the likelihood of developing or further increasing mental disorders. We’ve broken off from European trends quite often in our country’s history, so why not now?