Science says daylight saving time should last forever

Something will be right in the world Sunday.

In Seattle, sunset will come after 7 p.m. Thanks and praise to daylight saving time.

Winter’s darkest days will have passed. That they were made all the darker by the misnamed standard time is senseless.

To recap, daylight saving time stretches from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. That’s eight months less one week, which, for the non-mathematically inclined, is about two-thirds of the year.

And yet, we’re to believe the puritans who insist early morning sun is the norm. Standard time should be relegated to the temporal dustbin for a variety of reasons. Check out the gallery above for a look at some of them.

MORE FROM SEATTLEPI: Europe flirts with ending daylight saving time

Seriously, though, public health demands it.

It has long been known that time changes cause sleep loss, and sleep loss kills.

Here is how University of Oregon organizational psychologist David Wagner put it in a recent opinion piece:

"When we spring forward, the clocks on the wall advance, but our body clocks do not change so readily," Wagner wrote. "It generally takes a few days for us to adapt to the time change in a way that allows us to fall asleep at our typical time. The upshot is that Americans sleep approximately 40 minutes less than usual on the Sunday to Monday night following the switch."

Workers are more likely to engage in "cyberloafing" the Monday after the time change, surfing the internet when they should be getting down to business. People have more difficulty making morally complex decisions. Judges even hand down harsher sentences.

“Accumulating evidence reveals that the costs of shifting to daylight saving time cut across society,” Wagner continued. “Although the negative outcomes are varied, the singular solution seems quite simple: Rather than change the clocks, we should change public policy.”

But Wagner punts on where the clock should be set. But here, too, science may lend policymakers a hand.

A recent University of Michigan study found that later sunsets increase sleep duration.

“Through altered action of the circadian contribution to sleep drive, the model also predicts that later sunrises may slightly decrease sleep duration, whereas later sunsets and higher brightness should increase sleep duration,” the study’s authors found in their report, which was published in Science Advances in 2016.

Put another way, the later the sun sets, the longer people sleep.

So welcome back, daylight saving time. Perhaps a better-rested nation would let you stay.

SeattlePI senior editor Levi Pulkkinen can be reached at 206-448-8348 or levipulkkinen@seattlepi.com. Follow Levi on Twitter at @levipulk. Find more from Levi here on his author page.