[wittjeff]

Morning vs Evening Light Treatment of Patients With Winter Depression

"These results should help establish the importance of circadian (morning or evening) time of light exposure in the treatment of winter depression. We recommend that bright-light exposure be scheduled immediately on awakening in the treatment of most patients with seasonal affective disorder."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

[stickfigure]

Those people can get up later?

It really doesn't matter whether we're on daylight time or standard time, schedules will adjust to whatever makes sense for that particular locale. Just stop changing the damn clocks back and forth.

[davis_m]

The time most people wake up is dictated by when they need to be at work. They can't simply "get up later".

[danShumway]

Could work hours shift for those people?

What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?

Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.

I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?

[ghaff]

It's a mass coordination problem. Businesses have customers. OK, segments of the business that don't interact with customers could choose to switch working hours. But if I'm retail say, my customers probably expect that I'll be open at 10am for a random store.

[danShumway]

Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.

It seems like a solution where retail businesses were required to shift hours in the winter would still be preferable to what we have. Because what we have is kind of that already, except also it makes a lot of date math harder and affects non-retail workers too.

If the problem is that we need businesses to shift hours, we can do that through either regulation or social behavior or through other incentives -- we don't have to on top of that also change clocks, do we? Even just shifting public school hours and public transportation schedules alone would probably be a large incentive for many businesses to follow along.

[paulmd]

> Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.

that's how it works, though. We have a calendar with 365 days, turns out that's not quite how reality works. We could reallocate our calendar to fit reality, but it's easier to make reality fit our calendar.

[sicromoft]

How exactly would this business hours regulation work?

[tshaddox]

> Businesses have customers.

This seems like a laughable reason given that traditional business hours are literally the exact same as traditional work hours, so by this argument all the supposed customers are at work anyway and thus not at your store.

[ghaff]

No. They're really not. They're later than most people go into an office and they go into the (early) evening.

[creeble]

Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?

Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?

[danShumway]

> Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?

Yes. I don't personally advise that we do shift working hours, I think that breaking people's internal clocks and wakeup time is harmful. But, if for some reason people really want to do that, we don't need daylight/standard time changes to do it.

> Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated?

Yes, and that's actually a really good summation of my point. We aren't doing anything magical with time shifts, we are just coordinating business/school times. But we are doing it in a way that is a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and that is in some ways a lot less granular and useful than it could be.

Not every part of the US needs time shifts in order to make sure it's bright in the evenings/mornings. There could be some municipalities/states where having seasonal work times might make sense (again, I don't think that's the case, but I can see the argument for it). Other parts of the US might not need that at all. The time shifts are a really clumsy system for handling winter sunrise times given just how large the US is and how much daytime variety there is across the country.

> And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?

Personally, I don't think we need that much coordination and I don't think the current system really requires that much coordination or that it's desirable for everything to be synced up that way. I don't think anything would fall apart if we all stuck with DST permanently but in one state there was a local regulation that made retail shops open an hour later in the winter, or where school hours were different in the winter than in a few Northern states. I think that would probably be fine? I already have to check local store hours if I get up early and I'm visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood.

To go a step further, I also kind of feel like even that would be a mistake for many businesses (at least non-retail ones), I think forcing people to suddenly get up an hour earlier probably does more damage than seasonal depression for most people, and I would rather buy the remaining people with really bad seasonal depression sun lamps.

However, my point is -- the system is just obfuscating what we're really doing, which is shifting business/school hours. Even if you disagree with me about everything in the previous two paragraphs, even if you think this does need to be perfectly coordinated, and we do need to keep shifting business hours -- even in that scenario, we don't need DST/standard shifts to do that.

The time shift is just an illusion, what's really happening is the government is saying everyone should get up an hour earlier/later. Well, if we're OK with the government saying that, and if (for some reason) we want the government to say that -- then the government can just say that, it doesn't have to also force everyone to pretend that clocks are different. I don't necessarily think we should shift business hours at all, I'm just saying that we don't need to pretend that we have altered the timestream if we do want to shift business hours.

[yakak]

Shifts, etc, are all basically negotiated business by business, school system by school system, etc. The night shift, restaurant workers, school kids, etc, are really pushed around by logistics to match rush hours for office workers.

A split between organizations changing their winter and summer hours and ones choosing an hour earlier or later permanently is not necessarily harmful because it ends up spreading the traffic across more time. Everyone moving in sync causes a very precise traffic jam.

[tshaddox]

But isn’t it the case that the jobs that are directly concerned with whether the sun is up would also just do the job based on solar time with no regard for standard time? There’s obviously some need for accommodating those people so they can get their kids to school or have some time to go to the bank or whatever, but I find it hard to believe that applying standard time offsets twice a year is the most efficient way to make these accommodations.

[joncp]

Uh huh.

"Hey boss, sickfigure over on HN says I can get up later so I'll be coming in at 10. k thx"

[greyhair]

Lol! Oh yeah.

[xyhopguy]

this proposal will set sunrise at 9am during december in Oregon and washington. 'Wake up later' doesnt really work for most people.

[stickfigure]

How is 8am so much better? If you start work at 8am, you need to be up 1-2 hours earlier to get ready, commute, etc. The only people who wake up with the sun in the winter are folks that roll into work at 10am.

[xyhopguy]

Currently we deal with >= 8am sunrise for 2 months of the year. With this proposal, you get it for November and February too. yay!

[greyhair]

Says the person that has never punched a clock on a blue collar job.

7:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

[nerdponx]

Most people can't get up at 8 and get to work by 9.

[lacrosse_tannin]

You could get up earlier??