While trying to find something on the daylight saving contest I found some other articles about DST. This is from the first few I looked at.
Daylight-saving time is one of humanity's dumbest rituals, and you should be furious it still happens.
In the days after DST starts or ends, researchers have observed a spike in heart attacks, increased numbers of work injuries, more automobile crashes, and higher suicide rates. The whole thing started as a way to save energy, but it's mostly stuck around (at least in the U.S.) because sporting goods manufacturers and retail stores lobby for it. Americans go out, play more sports, and buy more stuff when there are more daylight hours after school and work.
DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America's favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn't understand why more people weren't appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines.
One of the most commonly offered rationales for daylight saving time (yes, it's "saving," not "savings") is the presumption that by extending summer daylight later into the evening, Americans would use less energy. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to hold true. After Indiana adopted daylight saving time statewide in 2006, researchers examined power usage statistics and found that electricity consumption there rose 1% overall, with a 2% to 4% increase in the fall months. The additional power usage cost Indiana power users $9 million a year and increased pollution, to boot, the researchers found. People used less electricity for light, but those gains were canceled out by people who used more air-conditioning during the early evenings. That's because 6 p.m. felt more like 5 p.m., when the sun still shines brightly in the summer and homes haven't had the chance to cool off.
DST also increases gasoline consumption, something the petroleum industry has known since the 1930s. This is probably because evening activities, and the vehicle use they require, increase with that extra daylight. Changing the clocks also causes air-travel synchronization headaches, which sometimes leads to travel delays and lost revenue, airlines have reportedly said.
The idea that daylight saving time was created to help farmers get their harvests in is so ingrained into the national consciousness, it's hard to believe it's not true. But it's not, according to Prerau, whose 2009 book "Seize the Daylight" traces the history of the time shift. Farmers, in fact, vociferously fought the proposals, arguing they cut productivity and made life overall tougher for them. "If you want to cut off 25 per cent of the productiveness of the American farmer, just keep this law on the books," Prerau quotes one agricultural lobby as arguing during an effort to repeal daylight saving time in 1919.
Daylight-saving time is literally killing us. Disrupting your sleep cycle upsets your autonomic nervous system. You make slightly more proinflammatory molecules and you're more stressed overall. The annual ritual in which we "gain" an hour of evening light by pushing the clocks forward may seem like a harmless shift. But each year on the Monday after the springtime switch, hospitals report a 24% spike in heart-attack visits around the US. Doctors see the opposite trend in the fall: The day after we turn back the clocks, heart attack visits drop 21% as people enjoy a little extra pillow time. In the fall the shift is a blessing; in the spring it's a fatal curse. In the weeks following the shift to DST, more women undergoing in vitro fertilization have miscarriages.
The problems don't stop there. DST also causes more reports of injuries at work, more strokes, and may lead to a temporary increase in suicides. Our bodies may not fully recover from the springtime bump for weeks. The single hour of lost sleep in the switch to DST increases the fatal crash rate in the U.S. by a calculated 5.4 to 7.6 percent for a full six days following the transition. By one researcher's estimate, that's 302 more deaths over ten years. Sleep deprivation only increases the rate of workplace injuries by 5.7 percent on the Monday after the switch. But the real effect is in days of work lost to those injuries: 2,649 in total, for an increase in 67.6 percent. In the fall, when we get a bonus hour of sleep instead of losing shut-eye, there's no known injury increase.
Stock markets do slightly worse. All those probably-already-sleep-deprived-and-now-even-more-so traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange perform ever-so-slightly worse on the Monday after DST. NASDAQ closes, on average, about 0.3 points lower. It's worth noting that there's actually a dip on every Monday, on average, though it's smaller. Everyone's least favorite weekday often closes 0.1 points lower than other trading days. But that "ever so slight" difference is 3 times worse after DST.
https://www.popsci.com/daylight-saving-time-effects-accidents-health https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3 https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/health/daylight-saving-time-facts-and-myths-trnd/