The Clock's Going Back!

It's 01:03 on Sunday 26 October 2025 — or rather it would have been 02:03 about three minutes ago. I just watched the clock on my screen roll back from 01:59 to 01:00, which is one of the more surreal experiences you can have while sitting at a computer in the middle of the night. British Summer Time has ended, we are back to Greenwich Mean Time, and I have theoretically gained an extra hour.

In a few months, it will be dark by 16:30. Again.

I've experienced this ritual twice a year for my entire life, and I'm sitting here in the small hours of a Sunday morning, watching time literally go backwards, still unable to wrap my head around why we continue doing it.

A Brief History I Didn't Ask For (But You're Getting Anyway)

Daylight saving time — or British Summer Time , as we call it here — was first properly implemented during the First World War. The reasoning was straightforward enough: by shifting clocks forward in summer you could reduce the need for artificial lighting during the evenings, thus saving coal for the war effort. Germany did it first in 1916, and Britain followed suit shortly after (because obviously we couldn't let the Germans have a monopoly on time manipulation).

After the war ended we kept faffing about with it. Some years we had it, some years we didn't. Then the Second World War happened, and we went absolutely mad — Double British Summer Time , where clocks went forward two hours. Can you imagine? The whole thing feels like a fever dream.

The current system — clocks forward in March, back in October — has been relatively stable since the 1970s, following various EU directives that tried to standardise the chaos across Europe. (Though with Brexit, we're now free to make our own questionable decisions about time, should we choose to.)

The Arguments That Don't Quite Add Up

The traditional justification for DST is energy conservation. The idea is that by having more daylight in the evening people use less electricity for lighting. This made sense in 1916 when coal was precious and electric lights were power-hungry.

But here's the thing — it's 2025. Our lighting technology has changed rather dramatically. LED bulbs use a fraction of the energy that incandescent bulbs did. Meanwhile we've gained things like air conditioning and modern heating systems that consume far more power than lighting ever did. Some studies suggest that the energy savings from DST are marginal at best, and in some cases the increased heating and cooling demand actually increases overall energy consumption.

Then there's the road-safety argument. Proponents claim that having more daylight during evening commutes reduces traffic accidents. Fair enough — but what about the morning commutes that are now plunged into darkness? The data on this is frustratingly mixed, with some studies showing benefits and others showing the opposite. It's almost as if moving an arbitrary human construct (clock time) doesn't actually change the fundamental physics of Earth's rotation and axial tilt.

The Personal Toll (Or: Why I'm Writing This Now at 01:08)

The thing nobody really talks about is how genuinely disruptive this twice-yearly ritual is to our bodies. I know it's 'just an hour', but that hour matters more than you might think.

The human body operates on a circadian rhythm — an internal biological clock (no pun intended) that regulates sleep–wake cycles, hormone production and basically everything else that keeps us functioning. This internal clock is remarkably precise, synchronised by external cues like daylight. When you suddenly shift everything by an hour, you're essentially giving everyone a mild case of jet lag .

I'm experiencing this right now, in real time. It's just past 01:00 and I'm wide awake, having just watched the clock roll backwards. My body is convinced it's past 02:00 and is thoroughly confused about why I'm still awake and what exactly just happened. The clock says I've gained an hour, but my circadian rhythm knows what time it really is, regardless of what we've collectively agreed to pretend. Studies have shown that the Monday after the spring clock change sees a spike in heart attacks , car accidents and workplace injuries . The disruption is real, even if it's 'just an hour'.

For people with anxiety (hello, it's me), the time change is particularly delightful. My brain, which is already running at a million kilometres an hour trying to keep me safe, gets thrown completely out of whack. Sleep patterns get disrupted, which exacerbates anxiety, which makes it harder to sleep, which... you get the idea. It's a feedback loop I could frankly do without.

The Modern Irrelevance

Here's what really gets me — most of the original justifications for DST simply don't apply any more, or apply far less than they once did.

Energy conservation? As I mentioned, the savings are negligible with modern technology. Some jurisdictions that have studied this carefully have found that DST might save them less than 1% of their annual energy consumption. Hardly worth the disruption.

Agricultural benefits? This one's particularly amusing because farmers generally hate DST. Cows don't care what the clock says — they want to be milked at the same biological time each day. Farmers end up having to gradually shift their entire operation twice a year to accommodate the time change.

Economic benefits? The argument here is that having more daylight in the evening encourages people to go out and spend money. Maybe that was true in the 1970s, but in an age of 24-hour online shopping and services, does it really matter? And even if it did, surely we could just adjust business hours instead of messing with everyone's internal clocks?

The Digital Complications Nobody Warned Us About

There's a whole other dimension to this that our great-grandparents couldn't have anticipated: the sheer digital chaos that DST creates.

Every electronic device we own has to handle time-zone changes. Smartphones, computers, smartwatches, thermostats, car systems, security cameras — the list goes on. Most modern devices handle it automatically, but 'most' isn't 'all', and the edge cases can be absolutely maddening.

As someone who spends a lot of time working with computers (primarily on my Mac, though I do run Arch on my laptop), I can tell you that dealing with timestamps across time-zone changes is a special circle of hell. Database entries, log files, scheduled tasks — everything gets complicated when you can't trust that 02:30 on Sunday actually happened once, not twice (or in spring, that it happened at all).

(Yes, I know UNIX-like operating systems such as macOS and Linux handle time internally using Unix epoch — seconds since 1 January 1970 — which doesn't care about DST. But the moment you need to convert that to human-readable local time for logs, user interfaces or scheduled events, you're back in the nightmare zone of 'which 02:30 did you mean?' and 'are we accounting for the time change properly?')

And don't even get me started on scheduled international meetings. Trying to coordinate with people across multiple time zones is already challenging enough without having to remember that some places change their clocks on different dates, or don't change them at all.

What If We Just... Didn't?

An increasing number of jurisdictions have decided that DST simply isn't worth the hassle. Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation, because obviously) doesn't observe it. Hawaii doesn't either. Most of Saskatchewan said no thanks. Russia tried it, hated it, and stopped. The EU voted to abolish the practice , though implementation has been delayed (shocking, I know).

The question is: if we did abolish DST, which time should we stick with? Permanent GMT or permanent BST ?

Permanent GMT would mean darker evenings in summer but lighter mornings in winter. It's the 'natural' time zone for our longitude, which has a certain appeal. On the other hand, permanent BST would give us those lovely long summer evenings year-round, but it would also mean that in December sunrise wouldn't happen until after 09:00 in parts of Scotland. That's... quite bleak, even by British winter standards.

There's no perfect answer, which is perhaps part of why we keep muddling along with the status quo. Change is hard, even when the current system is demonstrably causing problems.

The Psychological Dimension

There's something deeply unsettling about the way the time change affects our perception of reality. For most of human history, time was a somewhat fluid concept — you woke with the sun, worked during daylight and rested when it got dark. The Industrial Revolution and standardised time zones changed that, but there was still a certain logic to it.

DST breaks that logic. It's a collective fiction we've all agreed to participate in, where we pretend that changing what the clock says somehow changes the fundamental relationship between Earth and Sun. It doesn't, of course — but we act as if it does.

I find this particularly fascinating (and frustrating) as someone who's already prone to questioning reality a bit too much (thanks, thanatophobia). The time change is a twice-yearly reminder that time is a social construct, that the numbers on the clock are arbitrary, and that we're all just sort of... going along with it because that's what we've always done.

A Pattern I Can't Help But Notice

Speaking of patterns (one of my favourite subjects), I've noticed that the time change seems to disproportionately affect people who are already struggling with mental-health issues, sleep disorders or chronic conditions. It's not surprising — any disruption to routine can be challenging when you're already dealing with other issues.

But what bothers me is how little we seem to collectively care about this. The response is usually something along the lines of 'oh, it's just an hour, you'll adjust.' Which is technically true — most people do adjust, eventually. But 'eventually' might be a week or two, and in the meantime you've got a population that's collectively more tired, more irritable and more prone to making mistakes.

The cost-benefit analysis just doesn't seem to work out in DST's favour any more (if it ever did).

The Emotional Weight of Darker Evenings

There's an emotional component to the autumn time change that I think often gets overlooked. Yes, we gain an hour (theoretically), but we also lose something more valuable: the feeling of daylight extending into the evening.

I'm writing this in late October, and already I can feel the weight of the approaching winter. By December it'll be dark before I finish my afternoon classes at college. The mornings will be dark too, of course, but there's something particularly depressing about leaving a building at 16:00 and finding it's already twilight.

This affects mental health more than people realise. Seasonal affective disorder is real, and while the time change doesn't cause it, the sudden shift to darker evenings certainly doesn't help. The NHS even has guidance about managing SAD, which includes recommendations about light exposure — rather ironic given that we've just collectively decided to shift our schedules so that we get less evening light.

Conclusion: Inertia Is a Powerful Force

So why do we keep doing this? I'm asking myself this question about ten minutes after watching time literally go backwards on my screen.

Honestly, I think it's largely inertia. Changing a twice-yearly ritual that's been in place for decades requires coordination, political will and the willingness to potentially upset someone's preferred arrangement. It's easier to just keep doing what we've always done, even if the reasoning is outdated and the costs are real.

But I can't help feeling that we're overdue a rethink. The energy savings are marginal. The disruption to sleep and circadian rhythms is well documented. The digital complications are annoying. And the original agricultural justifications never made much sense to begin with.

If it were up to me (which, obviously, it isn't), I'd abolish the whole thing and pick whichever permanent time standard makes the most sense for our latitude. Let business hours adjust naturally to the seasons if needed, but stop messing with everyone's internal clocks twice a year.

Until then, I suppose I'll just keep grumbling about it every October and March, while my body gradually adjusts to a time change that I still don't understand and never asked for.

I'm using this 'extra' hour to write a rambling blog post complaining about it — though given that I'm writing this minutes after watching the clock roll backwards while my body insists it's actually much later, I'm not sure that counts as a productive use of my gained time.

It's now 01:15 — the second time we've had 01:15 tonight. My body is quite certain this is actually 02:15 and is rather annoyed with me for still being awake. The disconnect between what the clock says and what my internal rhythms insist is real is genuinely unsettling. Welcome to British winter time, I suppose.