I am Never Doing Daylight Savings Ever Again

I have cracked the code to good sleep.

November 02, 2025

I am writing this on Sunday, the 2nd of November 2025. As of today, Daylight Savings Time has ended in most of Canada. Clocks have rolled back, and most people woke up this morning an hour later relative to their previous waking time—except for me.

In March of this year, I decided to skip Daylight Savings. As I can’t avoid the time change on my Internet-connected devices, this meant moving all of my alarms and regularly scheduled tasks back by an hour to compensate for the clocks moving forward. Today, I have moved everything forward by an hour to compensate for the clocks moving back. Thus, my Daylight Savings Protest experiment has ended.

The result is as stated in the title: I will never voluntarily engage in Daylight Savings ever again. I will continue to dance around the time change, elegantly dodging the expectation that I should compromise my sleep for nearly 7 months of the year. I’m not just saying this for no reason, either. Experts agree that DST is bad for you.

It’s commonly thought that the act of changing the clocks is where DST’s harms come from. The general wisdom incorrectly asserts that everyone can “adjust” to the time change after a week or so and continue to live life as if nothing happened and no long-term harm will come of it. This ignores the fact that our natural circadian rhythms depend on the sun. No matter what, you can’t actually fully adjust to Daylight Savings Time because you’re going against your own body’s natural clock.

Imagine trying to go to sleep an hour before the sun actually sets.

You don’t have to imagine that. That is likely your reality for at least several weeks of the year. To mitigate this, you might need to use blackout curtains, a sleeping mask, or sleeping pills. Your body only gets its delicious sleep chemicals after the sun has set, so you won’t be able to fall asleep until well after you enter a dark space. With Daylight Savings, you lose much more than just an hour of sleep. In trying to force your body to sleep an hour earlier than it should, you get to spend 7 months losing sleep that you wouldn’t otherwise.

I know this, because I experienced the opposite. Over this past summer, I experienced a sensation I had never felt before.

I was sleepy before bedtime… in July.

I’m quite certain that I’d never experienced anything of the sort before. My recollection—and the expert opinion of sleep scientists backs this up—is that I’d have to force myself to bed while it’s still light out, then I’d struggle to sleep for several hours until finally falling asleep in maybe around 2 a.m. if I’m lucky.

This past summer, going to bed at 11 p.m. (matching my Standard Time bedtime of 10 p.m.), I’d often find myself falling asleep quite quickly. I would usually sleep clean through the night, rarely spending time laying in bed awake while desperately wishing to sleep.

Better still, I didn’t sleep in once. I often felt the desire to sleep in, but I never felt like I needed it.

As I type this article on Sunday, the 2nd of November 2025, most people in my province are struggling to adjust to the return of Standard Time—but not me. In relation to their circadian rhythm, the timing of their daily habits has been completely disrupted—but not mine. I’m in the fortunate position to be able to resist Daylight Savings, but I’m not the only one.

Though my findings are in line with the scientific consensus on sleep, n=2 means these specific findings can’t be generalized. Thus, this calls for a bigger experiment. If you’re sick of dealing with the nonsense that is Daylight Savings—and you happen to live in North America—you now have a little over 5 months to make your plans so you may join me in skipping the time change starting in March 2026. If possible, I strongly encourage you to do so.