Accidents and Sleep
In case you did not know the clocks “change” as they do every 6 months with the quaint notion of “saving daylight” and are advanced forward by 1 hour. There are some exceptions for those lucky enough to live in a country or state where the powers that be have smartly decided to do away with this World War program that has long since passed its prime
I was reminded thanks to this odd block in my calendar for tomorrow (Sunday 10 March 2019) – if you are wondering how it looks for the fall clock change – much the same oddly
I might as well declare my opposition to this ancient frustrating practice for many of the reasons in this article – one made worse thanks to the medley of technology and attempts to deal with this automatically. Go back long enough and there was a uniform process that had me walking around the house and cars and manually updating the time on all the devices, timers and clocks in our lives. I would elect to do this the night before for my convenience
These days that’s not possible as I can’t remember for each device if it does so automatically like my 2015 car does, has a “quick” DST option button/choice to move the time (my alarm clock), or in some cases gets it the wrong way and puts the time 2 hours out. So this will be one of my tasks for tomorrow.
Sleep Deprivation and Accidents
In a stroke of irony, I find myself attending the Sleep Show filled with companies trying to help people get a better nights sleep on the same day the worlds largest experiment takes place offering a huge data set into the impact of sleep deprivation
TL;dr In Spring when we “lose” an hours sleep, accidents rise on the roads, at work – pretty much everywhere and more health problems notably increase in heart attacks
In the fall we have seen a reduction in accidents suggesting that the “extra” hour in bed allowing the population who are generally overtired and not getting enough sleep an opportunity to be fully rested for a few days before the chronic lack of sleep kicks in again
Sleep is the Foundation of Health
Even without this data there are plenty of other studies and supporting evidence as Matthew Walker (@sleepDiplomat) points out repeatedly in his excellent book “Why We Sleep”
Progressively shorter sleep was associated with a 45 percent increased risk of developing and/or dying from coronary heart disease within seven to twenty-five years from the start of the study
and on Daylight Savings Time:
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but
I’ll be talking to the companies present at the sleep show to find any hidden gems and weed out some of the pseudoscience that inevitably creeps into any nascent industry going through a rapid expansion
I’ll be posting the interviews and thoughts in the coming days and weeks from my discussions and trying to find some incremental steps you can take to improve your health with better sleep hygiene as I detailed here
