You Can (and Should) Put the Clock Back—And Keep It So

As we put our clocks forward yet again after being promised an end to the practice, the heretical and unpopular case for wintertime couldn’t be any firmer.

Enoch Powell in 1976 once began a speech by decrying the pessimist’s motto, “you can’t put the clock back”. “Of all silly sayings”, he opens with, “one of the silliest is the saying that ‘you can't put the clock back.’” While he of course was referencing the fact that Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) was not irreversible (which turned out to be true, contrary to actor Kenneth Williams’ prediction in a debate in 1985), the silliness stands true also for the persistent practice of changing the clocks twice a year. And even after the European Union’s 2018 decision to drop this pointless fiddling with the clocks, here we are still, a week into yet another clock change.

Living in Spain, the clock going back an hour is made a whole lot worse by the fact we’re on the wrong time anyway. While our geographical solar time ought to be on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), Franco’s decision to align the hour to that of Nazi-governed Berlin’s in 1940 has put the country out of whack for over 80 years. While it was all Franco could probably offer the Führer for his help during the Civil War, the price is still being paid by Spaniards, who suffer the most when it comes to the clocks going forward every March. Come June, we don’t expect sunset until nearly 10pm. We are the textbook victims of the Western edge-effect, where, due to the changes, the Western most part of the population suffers from a number of serious ailments, from worse sleep quality to higher levels of obesity. It is also thought to be responsible for our weird mealtimes, need for siestas, and productivity problems.

But it’s not just Spain that suffers from the clock changes. Almost everywhere where the policy is in place, when 2am comes around on a random Sunday night in Autumn or Spring, the clock changes cause a lot of problems—both socially and health wise. Sleep disruption, increased heart attacks and strokes, and anxiety are just some of the harm changing the clocks do to our bodies, regardless of where the policy might be. And all this in the face of the very limited evidence that it does actually save any daylight at all. But, despite all this, it still persists, even though it is universally unpopular and provides no benefits whatsoever.

While we could lay the blame at the feet of many people—and particularly at the feet of New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who needed more daylight to collect bugs—the fact is that it emerged as a German wartime policy aimed at saving coal. This energy-saving justification was also what led it to be institutionalized in light of the OPEC oil embargo which caused an energy crisis. And it has remained ever since.

There are a number of reasons why it has remained, even though it is universally considered a bad idea on all counts. Despite 84% of the European public supporting the end of the practice and the unanimous backing from the US Senate of the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022, nothing has been done. Nadia Asparouhova, in her book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, offers an interesting perspective on one of the reasons with her concept of the antimeme. Deriving her theory from the Dawkins-Blackmore theory of memes, Asparouhova argues that ending the clock changes resists implementation due to its “flash flood effect”. As it is a policy that receives a very large amount of attention only twice a year, “nobody can sustain interest, nor retain the problem in their active memory” long enough to think about it until it bothers us again. It is a policy that we’re stuck with because we simply don’t have the attention span to have to deal with it.

However, the chief and simplest reason is, despite everyone rejecting it, we just can’t pick a time to stay on when ending the practice. We cannot decide whether we should stay on summertime and not put the clocks back come October or if we should change them for the last time. Indeed, this decision is also complicated massively by the fact that the scientific position and the social position are in complete disagreement as to what to do.

I have to confess that I am a social heretic when it comes to this issue. While the vast majority of people want us to stay on summertime, I have always advocated staying on wintertime. While I understand the desire to remain on summertime, as more light in the evenings would mean more time for socializing, after school and after work activities, for me, with the evidence pointing the other way, it would be difficult to ignore the imperative of picking the later hour. Yet the reality is that the summertime hour change is the one that causes the most harm, not the winter one. Light evenings put our circadian rhythm out of sync causing our melatonin to be suppressed later than it ought to be. By delaying morning light for longer, we often get up before daylight has broken, disrupting our morning cortisol awakening response. Permanent summertime has also been linked to greater road accidents due to the general fatigue compounding effect, as well as peak travel in complete darkness. This was particularly featured in the debate in Scotland over the permanent summertime experiment between 1968-71 in the UK.

So, in societies where sleep deprivation is cited as a main issue, it’s quite bizarre how summertime is still more popular. I’ve usually been surprised at people arguing for the summertime anyway since, putting the clocks back in the Autumn has always meant gaining an extra hour of sleep, rather than losing an hour in the Spring—I would have guessed that this impact would have created a negative association. However, while unpopular, staying on wintertime is undoubtedly the better option, especially given the benefits to health and sleep when it comes to aligning better with the natural solar time. In the light of our chronic sleep problems, it would be highly irresponsible, in my view, for policy makers to keep us on summertime instead of wintertime, just on that reason alone.