British Columbia to make daylight saving time permanent : NPR

A selection of vintage clocks are on display at the Electric Time Company, Thursday, March 9, 2023, in Medfield, Mass.

Charles Krupa/AP

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Charles Krupa/AP

In much of the United States and Canada, Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday.

Most people move their clocks forward an hour, trading an hour of sunlight in the morning for more daylight at the end of the day. In the end, the clocks will go back an hour almost eight months later to get more morning light during the darkest days of winter.

But British Columbia will change its clocks for the last time, ushering in a new era of permanent daylight saving time. This change was supported by “over 90% of British Columbians,” said David Eby, Premier of British Columbia.

“The way we live today in the modern age, having an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day, whether it’s winter or summer, makes a big difference for people,” Eby told NPR’s Adrian Ma. All things considered.

While the idea is popular among British Columbians, sleep medicine and public health experts aren’t fans of the time change.

“DST has been shown to have many negative effects,” said Emily Manoogian, a senior scientist at the Salk Institute and executive member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego. “And in fact, the United States tried permanent daylight saving time for a year in the ’70s. It was so horrible that they canceled it almost immediately.”

People went to work in the dark and children walked to school in the dark. And then, “there were a few fatal car accidents,” she said, which led to the rollover.

Eby acknowledged the health risks, but added that people in his province are used to waking up in the dark and taking their children to school in the dark during the winter.

“We’re in the far west of the time zone and we have dark mornings anyway,” he said. “People really want that hour at the end of the day.”

Why daylight saving time is bad for our body

While our world and modern lifestyles favor permanent daylight saving time, our biology supports permanent standard time. Indeed, according to Manoogian, our internal circadian clocks – which control not only our sleep-wake cycle, but also our cardiac and metabolic pathways – are synchronized with daylight.

“Light is the greatest signal for coordinating behavior,” she said. When we wake up and our eyes detect sunlight, they send a signal to the brain to tell the rest of the body to wake up and get ready for the day.

“So when it’s not light in the morning, your body thinks it’s not morning yet,” she explained. “And it’s very difficult to force your body to wake up without this light.”

Likewise, in the evening, when it is light outside, our body has more difficulty falling asleep. And it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of going to bed later and waking up harder in the morning. This cycle can affect our cognitive functioning during the day and our metabolism throughout the day. This has far-reaching public health consequences, Manoogian said. It can also lead to more car accidents, heart attacks and strokes in the week after the change to daylight saving time.

“We know that sleeping, eating, lighting up at the wrong time poses a huge risk for cardiometabolic disease,” Manoogian said. “Every medical and scientific society would say that we should never move to daylight saving time. It was originally created to try to save energy, [but] evidence has shown that this does not save energy.

A study by Stanford researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2025, changing clocks twice a year was found to have a considerable impact on public health, mainly by increasing the number of strokes and cases of obesity per year. The study also found that permanently switching to standard time would result in 300,000 fewer people suffering strokes and more than 2 million fewer cases of obesity.

“When we can better realign ourselves with our surroundings, we sleep better,” Manoogian said. “We are less likely to get almost every chronic disease you can imagine: cardio-metabolic, cancer, even depression, bipolar disorder.”

The Stanford researchers also found that permanent daylight saving time reduced strokes and obesity, but to a lesser extent than permanent standard time. In other words, as Manoogian puts it, “the health benefits of standard time are quite significant.”

Soften the blow of the time change on your body

If you’re concerned about how daylight saving time might affect you and your family’s health, Manoogian has some tips for smoothing the transition on your body.

• Get enough light in the morning: If the sun is out when you wake up, make sure you have enough light, Manoogian said. If it’s dark when you wake up, keep the lights on in your home at least as many nights as possible.
• Prioritize getting enough sleep: Seven to nine hours of sleep is considered ideal for adults, with some people needing more than seven hours and others needing nine hours. You know what your body needs, so make sure you get it. “Consistency is also key,” Manoogian said. So try to get the same amount of sleep every night.
• Have consistent meal times: “Maintaining a consistent diet during the part of the day when you are active and most able to process food can have significant health benefits,” she said. This might mean waiting an hour or two after you wake up to eat breakfast and keeping all meals within an 8-10 hour interval. “It can lower Hb1C, which is sort of the gold standard for measuring blood sugar,” she says. “It has also been shown to lower cholesterol in animal studies. It has been shown to increase lifespan and even lifespan.”
• Help children cope with jet lag: “Usually what we do for our family is we try to spend about 20 minutes a day over three days,” said Manoogian, who has two children. “It can go a long way” in helping children’s bodies adapt to change.