It’s times like this I wish I lived in Hawaii. Or Arizona. Or American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or on the Western lands of the Navajo nation. Those are the places under U.S. jurisdiction that do not observe the manifest folly of Daylight Saving Time, and will be leaving their clocks and watches exactly as they are when the rest of us are dialing ours an hour forward on Sunday, March 9.

The switch will happen as it always does at the decidedly unhandy time of 2 a.m., when anyone with a decent circadian sense will have long since gone to bed. It will mean that the sun comes up an hour later in the morning, leaving early risers to wake up in darkness. The sun will also hang around an hour later in the evening, contributing to an unseemly 8:30 sunset in most of the continental U.S. and the absurdity of an 11:44 p.m. sunset in Alaska on the June 21 summer solstice.

The U.S. is not exactly alone in fiddling with the time twice a year—but we’re hardly in the majority either. Roughly 60% of countries follow standard time year-round, and there is a growing American constituency for joining them. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) endorses eliminating Daylight Saving Time and staying on Standard Time year round, citing the increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, atrial fibrillation, emergency room visits, and traffic accidents when the clocks spring forward.

“The human biological clock is regulated by the timing of light and darkness, which then dictates sleep and wake rhythms,” the AASM wrote in a position statement in 2023. “In daily life, the timing of exposure to light is generally linked to the social clock. When the solar clock is misaligned with the social clock, desynchronization occurs between the internal circadian rhythm and the social clock…which has been associated with risks to physical and mental health and safety.”


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According to an AASM poll of 2,000 Americans, 63% support eliminating the seasonal time jumps—though the poll did not tease out whether they prefer Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time.

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The American Medical Association agrees that Daylight Saving Time belongs on the cultural scrap heap. In 2022, the group called for the elimination of the spring-forward practice, writing, “Some studies suggest that the body clock does not adjust to Daylight Saving Time even after a few months.”

A 2020 study in PLOS Computational Biology found that Daylight Saving Time adversely affects not just the body but the mind. When the clocks spring forward, the incidence of mood disorders, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse all rise.

Studies show that adolescents and teens might be especially affected by the clock change, exhibiting attention, learning, and behavioral deficits. At school they are often sleepier and have slower reaction times.