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Apparently Minnesota is ready to 'lock the clock'

But on which time, though?

MINNEAPOLIS — If there is one thing that can bring a split legislature together, it may just be the dislike of "springing forward" and "falling back" twice a year.

Parent Mike Freiberg knows that sleep training young kids through it is a waking nightmare.

"It would get to a point in the night when they were sleeping for a good stretch, wake up at a reasonable hour, and for no reason I could discern, we'd just change our clocks twice a year," Freiberg said. "And that would throw it off balance and make things difficult for us."

So Freiberg, who is also a state representative, decided to introduce a bill that would essentially, "lock the clock."

"Once Congress gives Minnesota authorization to move to daylight saving time permanently, we will switch to DST in the spring and never change our clocks again," Rep. Freiberg said. 

House File 72 and its companion bill, Senate File 149, passed.

The bipartisan agreement took Freiberg by surprise a bit, he said.

"It shouldn't have, but it kind of did because it is a fairly polarized place right now," he said. "It's not an ideological issue in every way; there are different opinions on it, but they don't line up with a person's party ID."

For Dr. Michael Howell, a neurologist at the U of M Medical School and M Health Fairview, he's on team Standard Time.

"As a general rule, I'm big fan of bright light in the morning," Howell said. "And I think a majority of the people need more light in the morning than they do in the evening."

But Howell says the most disruption comes from the twice-yearly change itself.

"If we wanted to switch completely to daylight saving time, I guess I would be for that if only just to avoid the shifting, which I think is the larger problem," Howell said.

That's because it throws our circadian rhythms off.

"That's our body's 24-hour clocks, and by going forward or backwards, we recognize that our brains and bodies are trying to understand where on the planet we are at any particular time," Howell said.

In terms of whether an hour here and another there makes a real difference?

"For the vast majority of people it doesn't make that big of a difference," he said. "However, if you were not sleeping well and all of a sudden you're sleeping a little worse, it does feel like a big difference."

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