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Adjusting to the physiological and psychological changes from traveling across time zones is essential for flight crews. However, another factor is added to the equation in most U.S. destinations every six months: the shifts into and out of daylight saving time. A bill to eliminate the twice-yearly practice of changing our clocks by an hour is making its way through Congress. In the meantime, it’s worth considering why adapting to daylight saving time is so hard on many people.
In a word: sleep. It’s the one activity that all of us perform more than any other, and yet it’s also the one that most often gets put on the back burner.
When you think about it, the blissful practice of “sleeping in” lays bare the reality that there is just not enough sleep occurring in our modern world. You don’t ever hear of anyone “catching up” on nutrition. Even exercise is prioritized over sleep—as evidenced by 4 a.m. spin classes and 24-hour workout gyms.
The Cost of Cutting Back on Sleep
Sleep is precious. Ample scientific evidence exists that getting enough sleep sharpens the brain, improves mood, helps regulate blood sugar, controls weight gain and boosts athletic performance.
Earlier this year, the American Heart Association added sleep to its cardiovascular health checklist, asserting that sleep duration is “an essential component for ideal heart and brain health.” And just last week, the Journal of the American Heart Association published results from a sleep study of 1,920 people conducted by Columbia University that found participants with short sleep duration had higher chances of having poor sleep efficiency (less than 85% of the time in bed asleep), irregular sleep patterns and excessive daytime sleepiness. They also had higher prevalence of obesity, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.
You may be shaking your head while reading this, thinking: “Great, but I’m in aviation.” Your schedule may be highly irregular, with a high degree of what…
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