Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s that time of the season when the sun behaves like so many of the rest of us: Reluctant to get out of bed in the morning, ever more anxious to get back there. Come Sunday it will be setting before 5 p.m. in Philly for the first time since since Jan. 13 as most of the nation yanks back the clock by an hour at 1:59:59 a.m., as daylight saving time ends and standard time begins. Not everyone is juiced about getting home and eating dinner when it’s dark, but sleep experts and the chronobiologists who study bodily rhythms insist that earlier daybreaks — the sun will be rising before 6:30 a.m., as it did two months ago — are better for us than later sunsets. “Absolutely,” said Robert Satriale, a sleep medicine specialist at Temple Health. He and others suggest that those who dread the earlier darkness just eat the spinach and — by all means — exploit the morning light. In honor of the longest weekend of the year — by a full 3,600 seconds — here are a few figures of note: Lara Weed, the lead author, cautioned that the study was hardly the last word. It was performed with computer modeling and didn’t involve human subjects, and would constitute ”just one piece of the puzzle." Time for a non-change? Experts in seasonal affective disorder and its lesser variant, the “winter blues,” extoll the virtues of morning light. It is particularly potent because it beams in a “different spectrum” and is “more alerting,” said Phyllis C. Zee, neurology professor at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Earlier sunrises theoretically would afford more opportunities for people to partake. The change ritual makes unjust demands on our bodies, said Satriale, who treats patients at Temple Health-Chestnut Hill Hospital. He suggested that people should try to stay on consistent cycles as they adjust to the twice-yearly changes. The waking process, he said, is not “like a light switch. It’s more like a dimmer switch. We just kind of turn it on slowly as the morning progresses. If you try to get up when your brain isn’t used to waking up, the brain still wants to sleep, and it’s hard to get over that sleep inertia.”
