2023-10-27 14:51:16
Increase in traffic and work accidents, learning difficulties, less concentration or insomnia problems are some of the effects that the change to winter time can produce and that can last up to two weeks, according to experts.
Visitors walk past the painting ‘The Nightmare’ (1781) by Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Fuessli. EFE/Alessandro Della Bella
The change from summer to winter time and vice versa, even if it is only an hour difference, has effects on health.
“Sudden changes in schedules cause our neurohormonal system, cortisol, melatonin, serotonin, cholesterol, which has its own biological circle, to become noticeably imbalanced,” stressed the coordinator of the Sleep and Chronobiology Group of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP), Gonzalo Pin.
In this sense, the vice president of the Spanish Society of Neurology, Jesús Portaexplained that people have two cycles that control sleep, an internal cycle – which sets the rhythms – and another controlled by the release of melatonin.
Furthermore, the neurologist has stressed that the disorders are registered “more in Spain than in other countries because it is outside the corresponding time slot”, since, being the most western European country, the hours of those in the country continue to be maintained. this.
“We have a problem, because it gets dark later than in the rest of the countries, so the intensity of the sun is blocking the release of melatonin and we go to bed later,” added Porta.
The most affected
Celso Arango, full academician of the Academy of Medicine in the specialty of Medical Psychologyhas highlighted that the time change has more effects on children and the elderly because they have “less adaptability and suffer from much more fragmented sleep with many awakenings.”
This means that they wake up to anything “atypical or abnormal” that happens, the psychiatrist explained.
However, Porta details that “the majority of people do not feel anything or the organic alterations last between two and five days”, but he has clarified that people who suffer from diseases – neurodegenerative (such as Alzheimer’s), insomnia, migraine or depression – It can last longer, even a week or two.
Mitigate the effects of time change
“Sleep hygiene is essential,” highlighted psychiatrist Arango, who advises, among other things, not taking stimulants in the afternoon, doing moderate exercise during the day, not just before going to bed, getting up instead of staying in the morning. bed without being able to sleep, and maintain stable sleep patterns.”
In addition, experts agree on the need to adapt the schedules a few days before the time change occurs.
EFE/LAURENT GILLIERON
Is changing the time beneficial?
The experts have concluded that “the ideal” would be not to make the time changes, since various scientific societies, including the Sleep and Chronobiology of the AEPhave shown that “different behavioral and public health problems” are generated.
The economic expense that justified the time change in 1974, with the first oil crisis to better use sunlight and save electricity, is no longer creditable today, in the words of Dr. Pin.
Arango also advises not to force the body to make “unnatural changes” twice a year, especially because “we already have a gap with respect to solar time, and the change produces an even greater gap.”
The initiative to eliminate the time change has been forgotten
The European Union recommended that member states put an end to these time changes: it did so before the pandemic and the arrival of the coronavirus caused the issue to fall into oblivion.
In September 2018, the European Commission proposed ending time change in 2019 after a public survey that collected a record number of responses (4.6 million) and revealed that the majority (84%) of European citizens wanted to end it. practice.
“Their thing, in Spain in this case, would be to stick with the schedule that is closest to our meridian, which is the winter meridian,” pediatrician Gonzalo Pin concluded.
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