Tuesday, March 15, 2011

ADJUSTING TO THE TIME CHANGE
Hmmm, I found this interesting--do you have trouble adjusting to the time change?  Studies show some do:

"Come Sunday morning, we'll have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. This sounds great, but researchers say that shifting our internal clocks twice a year might affect us adversely -- from more traffic accidents to lower SAT scores.
Daylight-saving time happens at 2 a.m. Sunday.
Losing an hour of sleep might not seem like a big jolt, but studies suggest that most of us don't get enough sleep as it is, so losing even an hour can take its toll.
A study published in February's Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics found that the biannual time shift caused a 16-point drop in SAT scores among high school students in Indiana.
A Canadian study from the mid-1990s found that traffic accidents increased by 8 percent the day after clocks were pushed forward one hour in the spring.
Accidents decreased by about the same amount when they were pushed back in the fall.
And in 2008, a study by Swedish researchers found that heart attacks decreased by 5 percent the day after the fall transition, presumably because of the extra hour of sleep.
The bad news was that heart attacks increased by 6 percent in the three days after the spring transition.
Andrew Winokur, director of psychopharmacology at the University of Connecticut, said we thrive on consistent patterns.
"When there's a sudden change in that, we as humans can feel it," he said. "I would say it's slightly analogous to jet lag."

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