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Daylight Saving Time: The Great Debate · Atmosphere with Emily Gracey

• Daylight Saving Full Ep: To change or not to change? That is the question. And with another clock change approaching, we're still arguing about it. The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent and eliminate the twice-yearly clock changes passed in the House this summer, but is now stalled in the Senate. So what's the right answer? Keep changing the clocks? Stay on daylight saving time? Or stay on standard time? Everyone seems to have an opinion. And this time Battle lines are being drawn in unpredictable ways. In terms of politics, the good thing is this really does cut across red and blue. You'd think science would give us a straightforward answer. It's actually more complicated than you'd want. There is good theoretical evidence, and evidence that I like from a theory standpoint, that being in permanent standard time is better for your circadian clock. But there isn't a lot of evidence to actually back that up. But maybe while we're arguing about changing the clocks. We're overlooking a much bigger issue. Americans get vanishingly little light. And that light is doing a lot more for our bodies than we realize. Going outside on a dark overcast day in Seattle, you still get around 10,000 bucks. Nice bright sunshiny day in the summertime in Texas, 100,000. This week on Atmosphere, Stanford sleep researcher Dr. Jamie Zeitzer. explains how sunlight helps our internal clocks, why modern schedules may be working against our biology, and some surprisingly simple ways we can get a better night's sleep. Because maybe the problem isn't what time we're setting our clocks. Maybe it's what we're doing with the daylight we've got. Meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation. Each week I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it. Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around. This episode is sponsored by Weather One Hundred. Weather 100 shows you how your weather ranks against 100 years of weather history. Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, thanks so much for talking to me about this today. This is a very polarizing topic. So I'm glad to get it straight from the source and kind of get the science behind this so that personally, so I can defend my position on it. But we're gonna talk all about time change. And I want to start with you because you specifically are doing work. On this. Can you give me a little bit of background on what it is you do and what you specialize in? Sure. So I've spent a a long time studying the impact of circadian rhythms and how light changes rhythms and how it impacts sleep and all sorts of interesting stuff on basically how can we adapt to a modern okay. And what does that look like? Do you have a sleep lab where you're studying people? How do you get this information? Yes. So we do lots of stuff. Basically, I I have I get bored pretty quickly. So so we bounce between various kinds of of experimental setup. So I do have a sleep lab. It's a very nice lab. It's it's here at the the VA hospital and it's all tightly controlled, no windows, and we control the lighting and we do very, very precise kinds of measurements on on the circadian clock in there. And then we also say, okay, well, that's nice, but how about the real world? And so we do lots of studies in ambulatory populations. and then we do in silicone modeling. So we basically take computers and say, okay, well, you know, we can study thousands of people, but how about millions of people? And, you know, can we basically do a kind of sandbox kind of stuff where we say, like, okay, well, you think we understand how the system works, but as if we try this with light or or this with time policy? How does that change things? So we clip between these various kinds of setups in order to get a good understanding of. We hear the term circadian rhythm and circadian clock a lot. Can you describe what that actually means? Sure. So circadian clock is this near 24 hour clock in your brain. You can think of it as literally that. It's a clock inside of your brain. And it tells you what time it is. And it's really important for basically predicting things. So if you have a clock in your brain, you not only know what time it is now, but what time it will be soon and what time things will occur. And so it allows your brain to Predict these things and basically prepare the body for it. So what it means, for example, is instead of your body going to sleep right now, it's saying, okay, in an hour it's going to go to sleep. Let's get the brain ready for sleep. And when you're ready to wake up, it's like, okay, let's get the body ready to wake up. So for example, one of the things that happens is that it predicts when you're supposed to wake up. And kind of as part of this prediction, you increase cortisol. And so this increasing cortisol is very important for getting energy ready. And so If you normally get up at 7 a.m., cortisol start to rise and it'll peak around six a.m. or so. and then when you get up, you have the energy for the day. That's great. But if you get up early, like, I got to go to the airport early, and then you get up, you can get up, but you actually you don't have the right amount of energy because your body didn't predict that. And so the clock is very important for optimizing things. If you get rid of the clock, which you can do in say a rodent, they don't drop dead, but they are definitely less efficient and less healthy. How do you get rid of the clock in a rodent? Do you remove all sunshine? No. So you you would actually go in and there are various ways, but basically the clock itself is this tiny, tiny set of neurons in the brain. And something called in mammals, including humans, it's called the superchiasmetic nucleus or the S C N. And you can basically go in and and destroy that. You can go in and destroy it with ultrasound or with a knife or with drugs. I mean there's various ways to to take out the clock. yeah. So you can So it's like a physical thing. This is actually in our brain. Okay. So what's the what happens to the rodents when you did that? So when you do that to a rodent, basically they lose organiz they lose 24 hour organization of their behavior. So they'll eat at random times, they'll sleep at random times, they'll drink at random times, they'll run around at random times. They're they can't predict when things are going to happen. And especially in rodents where they're actually quite dependent on on this kind of stuff, the they will basically be less healthy. And so if you A some people did this kind of study and put them out in a field and they more of them died than the ones who had an intact clock. And you can imagine if you don't know when it is if you're a rodent, you're not high in the food chain and you're outside and you don't know if it's day or night, well, you're gonna go out at the wrong time. If you're a nocturnal rodent, you're gonna go out during the day accidentally and like geez, it's kinda bright out here and then get eaten. So not so good. So, you know, that you you can do that kind of stuff in rodents and see what happens. We This might be a big question. Are we doing that to ourselves? Like with modern day technology and everything we're using? Well, we are definitely weakening the clock. We're not getting rid of the clock, but the clock is definitely weaker. And and that's mainly in individuals who have erratic sleep schedules. So i if you have a regular sleep schedule and you just live inside, it's not the worst thing in the world necessarily. Again, you can adapt to it. There are lots of caveats to that statement. It's definitely better to go outside and get light. Americans get vanishingly little light. The American Time You Survey indicates that we get around 13 minutes per day of light. Yeah. Which is really depressing. And I thought, well, I I now I live in California. I'm like, well, not in California. It's so nice here all the time. No, it's actually even worse in California. So we're we're on the lower end of the average for for getting outside and enjoying daylight. So but that being said, if you have an erratic schedule, then you weaken the clock. And that lots of people have. So if you don't keep a consistent time, basically if you don't keep a consistent bedtime and wake time, and then when you're awake, you don't get great lighting. Since lighting's really kind of what drives this clock in terms of its how strong it is and and where it's positioned, the clock gets weaker. And so then it becomes harder to keep a regular bedtime and wake time, which then gives you more random light, which makes it even harder. So it's definitely kind of a a a a a a vicious cycle. Okay. All right. Well, let's talk about the history of changing our clock. Do you have knowledge on like how we started doing this, why we started doing this? Is this something that kind of followed our work schedules? So this is something that had been mentioned, proposed, thought about for several hundred years, but it was really most people pin it on Kaiser Wilhelm during World War One as kind of the first person to institute this at at a national level. as a way to save money in Germany during the first world war. So it's not the farmers. Stop blaming the farmers. Not their that's everyone's like, it's the farmers. They want to get that's not them. Then yeah. And then it it had fits and spurts and not every country does it and hell, not every state does it. And so yeah. So so it kind of started back then and back in the seventies they they tried getting rid of of standard time, moving to permanent daylight time. And people hated that. So there there's a a market history, but it's definitely something that that people have opinions about, like what it should be. They do. And you know, even in my house, it's like we argue about this, but I mean, I can guess what your argument is, because this I hear this from most scientists, but can you tell me like what from our circadian rhythm and health wise, what is the best possible situation? Well, that's it see, it's actually more complicated than you'd want. So Many of my colleagues have signed on to petitions and and statements from various kinds of medical organizations saying that we have to go into permanent standard time, that that is better for your health. That statement's always bothered me because that's a very strong statement to make for a public health standpoint. And so if you're gonna make a statement like that, have good evidence. Right now, the best evidence is that the time switch in the spring is associated with negative effects, and the time switch in the fall is not. And the time switch in this in the spring, again, not always is it associated with negative effects, but many studies have found that. and basically the idea is that, well, when you move an hour and you lose an hour of sleep, such as happens in the spring, that's associated with negative outcome and negative outcomes like increased risk of heart attacks and car accidents, strokes, those are kinds of the main things. When you look at it though, the evidence indicates that the risk to any individual is vanishingly small. It is just when you have 350 million people doing it on the same day, even a really small effect, you can see. So this is like I I like to think of this as as the Shirley Jackson lottery. It's it's a lottery ticket, just not the lottery you want to win. So that is so that that is the the strong evidence. There is good theoretical evidence and evidence that I like from a theory standpoint, that being in permanent standard time is better for your circadian clock. But there isn't a lot of evidence to actually back that up. There's again good strong theory, but not actual data to say, no, no, this is actually better. And the theory goes that when you get that early morning light exposure closer to when you wake up, that will lead to a stronger, more robust circuiting clock, which leads to better health outcomes. Which again, in theory, is very true. And so this is something that we studied using modeling and and we basically took the entire e the lower 48 in in the United States and went county by county and looked at light exposure patterns based on natural light exposure patterns, and looked at health records and things like that, at each county and basically said, well, what happens if we keep people in permanent standard time, permanent daylight time, or continue what we're doing now, which is switching. And and of course you have in Arizona, they don't switch. They they they're always in in permanent standard time. And we did show that there were some effects, not as robust as as people would have hoped. But we did see some effects on the incidence of strokes and obesity, where permanent standard time looks like that would be better and better than permanent daylight time, and both of them better than what we're currently doing with switching. Now, that being said, that doesn't account for the fact that it was not a universal finding. That depending on which county you're in, it matters. So basically where you are east and west within a time zone matters. Like right now, if you're on the far eastern part of a time zone. The sun rises quite early. You're on the far western part of the time zone. It rises almost an hour later. It matters where you are north-south. So what might be good in Montana or Maine or Washington might not be so good for Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. So it makes it very complicated, letting alone the fact that you have people who prefer certain times of day. Like if you're a morning person, you want more light in the morning. If you're an evening person, you want more light in the evening. And You know, that gets at something else which is which we didn't study, but I think is really important to look at, which is, you know, we looked at it from a purely circadian perspective. What happens when you change this from a circadian perspective? But what we didn't look at, obviously it's not my area of expertise, but I I hope someone will, is well, what happens if you move that hour of light? Because people think like, you're getting more light. You're not getting more light. Right. That's finite. Like I wish I could change that. It'd be really popular if I could change how much light, you know, was there, but I can't. I can just You can just change when it's occurring. Well, does it change exercise? Which would imply that it might change health. So do people exercise more if you move that hour of light into the morning or into the evening? Well, two of the big proponents for having permanent daylight time are golf courses and outdoor mall owners, because they think they're probably correct, is that if you have more light in the evening, more people would play golf after work, more people will go shopping after work. And I I don't know, I'm not an economist. That sounds reasonable to me. And the question is, is that well, if more people are playing golf then maybe that offset some of the health effects. Or maybe they would just get exercised in a different way. I don't know. It's it's an important question to think about, you know, if you're thinking about the health consequences. And and even the economic argument is like, well, who's gonna be making that money? If you're making more money, who who's making that? Is it actually going to benefit people's health? Or is it just gonna make wealthy people wealthier? And again, I'm not saying one is right and the other's wrong, but my concern is about overall health of of No, o of Americans. So I'd like to see it where that if the economics imp so if the economics basically changes such that more people who are underemployed now have full employment and they get health benefits, great. That would be a big boon. But if it's just that wealthy people are getting wealthier, well, that's probably not gonna change the health needle very much. There's so much to unpack here. And that doesn't even factor in. Like I I'm a mother, so my my thought keeps going back to like kids and especially like school in the morning and bus stops and dark bus stops. But then also like is school starting too early? Like, is it about our schedules? And should school really start at seven twenty five or should that shift? Like there's a there's so much about like the way we schedule our lives that seem to factor in here. Cause like you said, the we're not getting more sunshine, we're just shifting when it is and adjusting it to our lives, right? Yeah. Well, and this is one of the one of the things that people complained about, at least in in in the in the news at least, back in the seventies, was you know, kids waiting in the dark. You know, 'cause if you're if you're basically having permanent daylight time in the winter, now it's gonna be an hour later. And so it's already dark. And I I grew up in New York. I remember waiting for the bus in the winter and my hair literally freezing because I had taken a shower in the morning and having icicles in my hair and it being dark out. Yeah. I mean it's And now you're gonna it's gonna be even an hour later. So yes, and and you're right, the there's always these concerns and th there's a lot of push pull, especially for older kids in high school, whether starting too early. California has a law now mandating that schools mostly have to start after or at least high schools have to start after eight AM and and to kind of get kids more sleep. Look, this is time policy. You can change time what how you want. China has one time zone. It's a really wide country to have one time zone. Yeah. And so I was asking a colleague of mine who who who lives there and I said, Well, do people just do everything later? Like, like if you're on the if you're in Beijing time in the eastern part, like, okay, so going to work at eight o'clock, nine o'clock makes sense. But if you're in the western part of the country, like, does that make sense at all? Like, you know, eight o'clock in the morning is basically the equivalent of four or five AM. And he goes, No, no, people, they shift their schedules. so they just do things later. So you can do that, but it's this is a choice. It's there there is this issue of time and and this all gets back to your original question, which is which is the best? Now, the best is is the most untenable, which is sh we should go back to what we used to do, which is have local time, which is basically the clock tower in town rings at high noon when the sun is in the middle of the sky. And that sets all times. That's great. But we already had a hard enough time figuring out when we're going to meet and that's unfixed time zones, let alone If you're talking about minutes of differences, how much every well, I think we're 63 minutes difference. No airline. Travel would be a disaster. Completely. Well, this is why they in fact made time zones, is because of trains. Is if you want to know when the train was going to be there, well, you had to have these kinds of standardizations. So anyway, it it's I do think local time is the best. And if you if we stay in permanent standard time, that's great for the circadian clock, but not for everybody. And if we stay with our current switch, again, we have this once yearly, you know, increased risk, which I should mention, by the way, there are many, many, many nights on which people lose an hour of sleep and move their sleep by an hour, if not many more hours, like three or four hours on the weekend for a lot of adolescents and and people in their twenties. It's just that the government is making them do it. That's that's the difference. Like they're doing it by choice as opposed to the government telling them that you have to do it on this day. Is it healthy? No, it's not healthy. You know, it's not healthy to you know, to to lose the sleep and to move your sleep around. But it's something that people are going to do because the well, one is that the health effects are are small but real. But it would be really hard to tell someone in their twenties, you know what, you should basically never go out at night because in 30 years you're going to have a two percent reduced risk of having diabetes. That's not going to move the needle. So again, this is something that that we do, but people like to complain about it because they're being made to do it. And so that's why those specific and it's a pain when you do now I have to say I got married on daylight savings in the fall, which means that if you show up late, you're still on time. Do you do that on purpose? It was not. It's a self workout way. What is normal weather? Between dramatic headlines, record this, extreme that, and hundreds of weather apps all showing you basically the same information, it can be surprisingly hard to tell what's actually unusual. That's where Weather 100 comes in. Weather 100 is a minimalist desktop weather display that compares your local weather with the last 100 years of history, showing you how unusual it really is. From today's maximum temperature to last month's rainfall to this week's highest wind speed, Weather100 updates every day with the latest rankings, giving you context you just don't get from a normal weather app. Every Weather 100 also includes access to the free iOS and Android app, letting you explore weather rankings for locations all around the world. Starting at $49.99 with free shipping worldwide, Weather 100 has five different models and 10 colors to choose from. And listeners of Atmosphere will get 20% off by using the code EMILY20 at checkout. That's EMI20 for 20% off your entire purchase. Weather 100, your weather in context. Okay, yeah, I kind of like it. I like tradition. That's why I like changing the clocks. It like signals the changing of the season. Like just in the way I guess that sunshine wakes us up. Like that change in clocks makes me think like, All right, Christmas is right around the corner or spring and warm weather is right around the corner. So I don't mind it. Okay, let's go back to like your work and sleep and sunshine specifically, because this makes me think we just get less sunshine in the winter. Our nights are longer. Does our body want to sleep more in the winter? Is it healthier to sleep more in the winter? So that's a great question. It's a it's a complicated question as well. This is why I'm a PhD in an MD. MDs have to give real answers. I can give, I can give qualified answers. So the so we don't have there's not a lot of evidence in humans that we're that we are strongly seasonal, right? So there's not good evidence that we are. There are some animals that are very strongly seasonal, like, you know, sheep. And Siberian hamsters and bears and geese. These are all very strongly seasonal. And they they have a clock there which basically tells them what time of year it is. So bears can fatten up with just Fat Bear Week. How do they know? Well, 'cause they know what time of year it is, because they keep track of how long the nights are and then keep track of this. Canada geese, when they fly south with the winter, they have to know when. They can't wait until it gets cold before they start flying. So there's lots of animals like that. You have sheep only give birth at a certain time of year. So They are actually not even able to get pregnant at other times of year. So there's a lot of animals that are very strongly seasonal. If humans are seasonal, it's quite weak. So that being said, there are definitely some people who have seasonal affective disorder where the longer nights definitely impact their brain and makes them more depressed. There are many more people who get depressed in the winter and therefore will sleep in because it's cold, it's dark, and they're isolated, you know. So you're living in Wisconsin. It's twenty below out again, and you're not saying friends as often. Okay. Yeah, that would be depressing. If you if you can't get outside as much, if you can't see people as much. And especially if you're a social person, you know, if you you don't mind it, then it's not a big deal. But a lot of people they they like that. I mean, I like that, I like seeing human beings. So it's so it's very difficult to kind of decouple these this the socialization aspects of it versus the biological aspects of it. But it does appear that there's some people who definitely have this kind Of of seasonal depression. Now, do they need more sleep? It may be a little more sleep, but many times it's that they're depressed. And then when they're depressed, that kind of feeds into having disrupted sleep, making it a little more complicated to understand whether it's they need the more sleep or they're just getting more sleep and their sleep isn't as effective as it was, say, in the summertime. Okay. Does have you done any research on sun angle? Like Where we live or time of year or time of day even, does that make a difference? It can. So there's lots of interesting stuff with with with that. I mean, mainly we respond to how bright it is. That that is the main thing that that we respond to. And humans are particularly bad at understanding brightness, we do this thing called a qubit compression to for for our perception of brightness, which basically means that if I were to sit you in front of the screen and say, increase the left side until it's twice as bright as the right size. You would go two to the third and basically increase it eightfold before you said it was twice as bright. And so just to throw some numbers out there, if you are like a typical typical bedroom is gonna be in 50 lux of light, living room, maybe up to 75. You know, a a well-lit kitchen or bathroom could be 200 lux or 300 lux. You know, a well-lit office is gonna be like 200 to 300 lux. A doctor's office might be up to 500 lux. Sitting by a window looking outside is around a thousand lux. Going outside on a dark overcast day in Seattle, you still get around ten thousand lux. Wow. Nice bright sunshiny day in the summertime in Texas, a hundred thousand lux. So you're talking about orders of magnitude more light when you go outside. So going outside is not the same as being inside. Computer screens. Well, your phone, if it's at normal brightness at night, it looks really bright because it's basically this light. with all this dark around it. And so it it it looks like it's really bright. It's not that bright. It's around twenty lux or so, depending on how close you have it to your face and how bright it is. Go outside, you get so much more light. Light boxes that a lot of people use who have seasonal affective disorder or are trying to adjust their clocks, those are rated at around ten thousand lux, which usually means that if you're sitting at a normal distance and don't have your face up against the light, it's around three thousand lux. So it's about the equivalent of sitting out sitting at your window and looking outside. Now, for light boxes, it's well again, if it's the winter time and you live in the north and it's six AM, well, the sun's not going to be up for a while. And so a light box is great. It can really increase the amount of light. But if you're in, you know, if you're in Florida and it's you know, it's in the fall, you can go outside, you know, get the nice sunshine. I have a colleague who's in Arizona and she says the only time that you can go outside is in the morning. Otherwise it gets too hot. So this is before it gets too hot out. She can go outside in the morning. But it happens to be a really good time for the keying clock to get that sunlight. And definitely going outside, you're just getting even again, even a foggy day, you're getting five thousand, ten thousand lux light on that dark overcast day, as opposed to being inside when you're inside on an overcast day, you're you're getting seventy lux. So much, much less light. Okay. This is really good advice. So if you're like someone who's having trouble falling asleep at night. you should get up and immediately go outside in the morning and that gets things kicking. If you want to go to sleep earlier, yeah. so i if that's if basically if you're like many people who are night owls and you know you want to kind of kind of establish that morning time as as that's when I'm gonna wake up and it's hard. But yeah, getting out, get getting that light in the early morning's great, avoiding light in evening is great. And then there's also a trick, which is that you can mitigate the impact of evening light. So most people are like, okay, I'll do this, it's fine, but I don't want to sit in the dark at night. I'm I'm awake. It's 10 o'clock at night, and I don't want to sit in the dark because I'm still wide awake. I want to do things. Well, if you do things in general, you need light. And so how much light do you need? Well, are you gonna walk around with sunglasses on in your house? Well, some people will in blue blockers and things like that. But the other thing you can do is just go out in the afternoon, around four or five in the afternoon and get sunshine. And when you do that, it changes how You respond to that evening light. And that evening light response goes down. So you go outside, four o'clock in the afternoon, you sit outside for half hour. All of a sudden that screen you're looking at in the evening, the light not having much of an effect on you. Wow. Okay. And this works on kids too. People are having trouble getting their kids to sleep. So kids are trickier. Kids are actually this colleague in Arizona has done some wonderful work. her name's Lauren Hartstein. Look her up. She does great work. Super interesting stuff on young kids, and they are much more sensitive to light. than adults are. And so kind of any light exposure and they are changing their circuiting clock. and you know, getting kids to bed early is a little tricky because often what happens is that we're done parenting. For people who aren't parents, they're like, what do you mean? Anyone who's a parent, yeah, I I I get this, right? Like you're like time. Check it out. Right. Nine o'clock, I'm done. I'm done parenting. I want to have alone time or time with my spouse. I want to have adult time now. And so it's like time to go to bed. And again, if but if your kid is is isn't isn't is an owl, well, they might not be ready for bed. And they also might not be able to accurately express the fact that they're not ready for bed. So it's very complicated there of getting kids to bed earlier. It's one of the reasons that melatonin is so popular in kids, is because it doesn't work very well during the night. But if you're trying to put kids sleep, if their kids are trying to go to sleep too early, before their brain actually thinks it's ready, time for bed. That's when the melatonin's gonna work. And so in many kids where it works, it's because you're putting them to bed too early. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. I'm just saying that's how it's working. And honestly, for a lot of kids, it's difficult because if they are late night, schools start early and they're not getting enough sleep and then they're tired and it's hard to get them up. Has there been genetic research on who are these like quote unquote morning people versus like evening people? Yeah, there have been a number of I haven't done this, but a number of people have looked at this and and tried to figure out the genetics behind it. And and there are pretty strong genetics on the extreme. So people get up at five AM who like getting up at five AM. Like they're wide awake, alert at five AM. There's some pretty good genetics looking at that. And there's also some pretty good genetics that people were like, I can't fall asleep before three AM. Like these super late night people. And the the genetics there are pretty good in terms of there are a number of different proteins that are involved in the circadian clock that you can see alterations in that lead to this. So Good strong basis. Most people don't fall into those categories. Most people fall into the more flexible range where they prefer night or prefer morning. Dr. Zider, is there anything else you want to share about changing clocks or circadian clocks? You know, my my my fondest wish is to have kind of a national dialogue on this with people who are not entrenched in their positions and people who are, you know, open to any of the possibilities. See what works best for most people because whatever solution it is is not going to work. For everybody. That is a guarantee. So it's okay, well, what's gonna work best for most? and it might be doing what we're doing right now. It might be changing time zones by a half hour, making time zones smaller. That's been a suggestion. Well, there was one which was one of the suggestions out of Congress was to basically move a half hour into a permanent daylight time. So not a full hour, but a half hour and switch that. There are a lot of different options. Let's model these. Let's see what is gonna work in terms of biology, in terms of health, in terms of behavior. Because again, if we do something that people are like, well, this sucks, they're not gonna do it. You know, they're gonna protest and and argue and complain. So again, it's really it it's trying to figure out what works best for most, knowing that it's not ideal, but this is what happens in public health, w is that you gotta kind of take one for the team and might not be ideal for you, but if it works for most people, you kind of begrudgingly go, all right, fine, I'll do this. You'll be nice. But does the name of the bill bother you as much as it bothers me? Because we're not actually saving any sunshine. Well, yeah. But this is this is this is politics that I try not to get too deep into. There was a there was one senator who asked his constituents, what do you like better? Summertime or wintertime? And they're like, summertime. Go on. Like, see, you like daylight savings. Like, no, that's not the question. There was another senator Who actually used my work in support of permanent daylight time, because he correctly said that permanent daylight time is w is better than what we're currently doing switching in terms of the circadian bio biology. But didn't mention that permanent standard time is even better than permanent daylight time. But this is politics. And you know, again, none of this, I have to say none of the data that are out there are so overwhelming that we should force through any kind of ruling on this. It's not like Honestly, like, because you can't test it, you can't prove it. We have to have a a a reasonable conversation to really figure out what works best for most. Even though, again, it's not going to be ideal for everybody. And a lot of people are going to hate it. But I have to say, in terms of politics, the good thing is this really does cut across red and blue, which is you have lots of people who are on one side of the ideological spectrum who love their morning light. And on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, they also love their morning light. Same with the light. So it's kind of fun. It's making it fun. It is. Right, right. Yes. Now now you now your neighbor who you normally hate because of their lawn signs, you're like, we agree on this. Thank God we agree on something. And then someone else who you're like you've known for years and you go to political rallies with, you're like, I hate you because you don't want my my life happening. So Yep. Well, Dr. Zaido, thank you so much for your time today. This was really fun and enlightening. There you go. Thank you so much. Great to get to chat with you, Emily. Thank you to Dr. Jamie Zeitzer for joining me on this episode of Atmosphere to talk about circadian clocks. If today's episode sparked any questions, or if you just want to talk weather, you can connect with me on Facebook. I'm Emily Gracie Meteorologist, or you can follow along on Instagram at AtmospherePodcast. For those who like to go beyond the audio, I'm also publishing deeper dives, episode recaps, and extra content every week over on Substack. If that sounds like your sort of thing, I'd love for you to subscribe and join the community there. If you enjoyed this conversation, taking a second to follow Atmosphere on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts ensures you won't miss the next one. Atmosphere is a production of Mike Burst. It's produced, hosted, and edited by me, Emily Gracie. If you're looking for a quick roundup of the week's biggest weather talkers, check out Weekly Weather Brief. It's a 10-minute video podcast where my fellow meteorologist Karen Jerriman and I give you a rapid-fire rundown of what you may have missed. It comes out every Friday morning, so subscribe to Weekly Weather Brief on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple to stay up to date. I'm Meteorologist Emily Gracie. Thanks for taking the time to slow down, stay curious, and explore the atmosphere.