Dealing with time change and the shortening day

A perennial topic on this blog, covered many a time in the past; I shall cover it again now.

At 3:00am tonight, the clocks go back and it will be 2:00am all over again. All over Poland, night-train services will stop where they are at 3am for one hour, reaching their appointed destinations at the same time in the morning as every other day of the year (and not depositing their passengers there an hour early).

For the rest of us, the time change means an extra hour's lie-in tomorrow morning, but at the cost of one hour of evening daylight every day for the next five months. By 8 December, the sun will set at 15:23 in Warsaw and will do so until 19 December, when it sets at 15:24. Below: today, Chynów, 17:11. By tomorrow, 16:09. One hour and two minutes less afternoon daylight than today.

And then the daily loss of around two minutes a day every day until that earliest sunset on 8 December.

Other than that extra hour in bed for all, the time change benefits the early riser, who gains an hour's daylight first thing in the morning. Now that is not me. I need that hour in the evening. The annual pain that comes from the Hammer of Darkness around mid-November, once I've adjusted to the time change but before the jollity of Xmas comes into play, gets to me. Seasonal Affective Disorder. 

But surely, time is relative? Determined by convention? Surely I can choose to go to bed today before 22:30 and wake up around 06:30 tomorrow morning, having had my eight hours' sleep, and then go to bed tomorrow night at 21:30, sleeping until 05:30 on Monday and then keep on doing so until Sunday 27th March 2022?

Could do. But then I'd suddenly become out of sync with society. I'd have to work 8am-4pm while my colleagues kept the nine-to-five; I'd leave social gatherings an hour before everyone else so as to get my sleep timed right. So no, it's not practically possible. I will certainly do so tonight and try keep at it for as long a possible, but with Xmas approaching, it's unlikely that I can keep this up until the clocks go forward next spring.

The EU has suspended work on abandoning the seasonal time change until 2026 because of the pandemic. It is clear from opinion polls that the time change is not popular (78% of Poles want it scrapped), and that the extra evening daylight hour - which means keeping summer time the year round - is the preferred option (73% of Poles). As well as arguments for human health, there's also the energy saving from having that daylight hour in the evening rather than in the morning. 

However, it's not clear that this will happen.

The notion of 'natural time' (12 o'clock noon being when the sun is in the zenith, equidistant between sunrise and sunset), is a strong argument for keeping winter time all year round. It is astronomically, mathematically pure. It is symmetrical. 

Yet it is suboptimal from the point of view of energy use and also from how people spend their lives in post-agricultural society. I would argue very strongly against those who counsel for keeping winter time and not switching to summer time. 

From the health point of view, I keep a daily record of my blood pressure, and I can see a clear correlation between going to bed late and high blood pressure the following morning. If I go to bed at or before 22:30, my blood pressure tends to be at or below 120/80. If I go to bed around midnight, it can be as high as 135/90 the next morning. Late nights also mean a weaker immune system. All those viruses coursing around the blood system get to seize their moment. The body's circadian rhythm (body clock) doesn't cope well with a sudden one-hour shift in bedtime.

I shall therefore endeavour to go to sleep at the time I've been used to for the past seven months, and not take advantage of the extra hour - I'll go to bed tonight at 22:30 (summer time) and wake up at 5:30 (winter time) tomorrow morning. And see if it turns me from an owl into a lark.

This time last year:
A sustainable food system for rural Poland

This time last year:
Sifting through a life

This time four years ago:
Throwing It All Away

This time five| years ago:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again

This time six years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back

This time eight years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury

This time nine years ago:
Thorunium the Gothick

This time ten years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew 

This time 12 years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden