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Sleep specialist discusses impact of daylight saving time

While Dr. Howell isn't sold on this one hour being a complete takedown on our sleep, he does think it's time to stay on one time, year-round.

GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — When you woke up this week, you may have been missing that spring in your step, due to losing an hour for daylight saving time.

For years, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has been saying to get rid of it altogether.

So we went to a sleep doctor here in town to ask him about the hour that got away from us this weekend. While he is in favor of letting this old practice of clock switching go, he also says this change shouldn't be a total game-changer for you.

"An hour change really shouldn't make that big of a difference. It really shouldn't," says Dr. Michael Howell. "It does for some because they are suffering from underlying sleep problems, so the question to ask people who struggled to wake this morning...'What else is going on with your sleep?' That's the question I would ask."

Anytime we switch time, our bodies aren't super quick to change with it. That's because our bodies are in harmony with the outside world through a biological clock. Anytime you mess with that artificially, it can mess with how you feel and how you rest or don't.

While Dr. Howell isn't sold on this one hour being a complete takedown on our sleep, he does think it's time to stay on one time, year-round

"My preference would be to go back to standard time. That's the time we have in winter where we have more light early and less light later. The reason why I say that is I think in general most of us don't get enough light in the morning. We tend to get too much light in the evening because of screens, phones, tablets etc."

It's harder to get that light in the morning right now, and light is the natural way our body wants to wake up.  

We "overlight" ourselves in daylight saving time with the actual light later in the day, and then the blue lights of our screens.

So Dr. Howell's on "team standard" for all.

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