Time change escalates heart attacks and car crashes

Time change was brutal for me this year.

Saturday night, I tried to go to sleep an hour earlier to make up for the hour that would be stolen from me overnight, but my body didn’t get the memo. After lying in bed for the hour I thought I was saving, I was so frustrated that I had to get up and read for another hour until I became sleepy enough to go to sleep.

If, like me, you wish time change would go away, you’re not alone: 63 percent of us would prefer to eliminate this foolishness and 55 percent of us experience tiredness after the switch.

But it gets worse: according to sleep expert Dr. Adam Spira, “The scientific evidence points to acute increases in adverse health consequences from changing the clocks, including in heart attack and stroke.” Sunday’s change is also associated with a heightened risk of mood disturbances, hospital admissions, and an elevated production of inflammatory markers in response to stress.

The potential for car crashes escalates as well: a 2020 study found that the switch raises the risk of fatal traffic accidents by 6 percent.

What candles have to do with it

Why, then, do we do this? Blame Benjamin Franklin and candles.

Contrary to popular opinion, Franklin did not actually invent Daylight Savings Time. However, in 1784 Franklin (then living in France) suggested that French citizens could conserve candles and money by coordinating their schedules with the sun. A century later, a New Zealand postal worker and entomologist named George Vernon Hudson presented the basics of the idea. Germany enacted Hudson’s idea in 1916 to save energy in the midst of World War I, and many nations followed suit.

Today, around seventy countries (such as mine, unfortunately) observe the time shift, though most do not.

Proponents claim that the additional daylight in the evening hours during spring and summer is beneficial to the mental health of those who work during the day, but studies have refuted this assertion. Nor does the change save energy anymore (if it ever did): we use more air conditioning and heating during the longer days.

So, if you hate the change, you can move to Arizona and Hawaii, the two states that don’t change their clocks. Or you could have taken steps to lessen the impact prior to the time change, though it’s obviously too late for that now.

As it is, we are left with the aftermath of a strategy that began with a desire to conserve candles. Truly, we live in a fallen world.

“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”

In many ways, our lives are radically different from those who lived in Benjamin Franklin’s time.

For example, journalist Charles C. Mann writes in the Free Press that people in Franklin’s era were closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than to ours. He notes that the electric grid, public water supply, food distribution network, and public health system we take for granted were nonexistent in their day.

Up to 30 percent of children died before their first birthday; 43 percent did not survive past their fifth birthday. A child who lived to the age of ten had only a 60 percent chance of surviving to adulthood. Common causes of death included smallpox, dysentery, typhoid fever, malaria, and yellow fever. 

And yet, the brilliance of Founders such as Benjamin Franklin created the nation we experience still today. Consider some of Franklin’s most famous statements:

• “Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.”
• “He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”
• “Better slip with foot than tongue.”
• “He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows or judge all he sees.”
• “Well done is better than well said.”
• “What you seem to be, be really.”
• “No gains without pains.”
• “Pardoning the bad, is injuring the good.”
• “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
• “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.”
• “It is better to take many injuries than to give one.”
• “Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”

I wish I had said any of them. I especially appreciate this maxim: “A right heart exceeds all.”

Therein lies my point today.

“A complicated mix of sins”

Elihu said to Job, “I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay” (Job 33:6).

Consider Benjamin Franklin as an example. According to Ken Burns, who filmed a two-part documentary on Franklin for PBS, the founding father was “a complicated mix of sins.” For example, he owned slaves and even printed rewards for runaway slaves (though he later became a prominent abolitionist). In his twenties, he fathered a son by fornication or adultery and never clearly revealed the name of the mother. In 1730, he took Deborah Read as his unlawful wife since she was legally married to another man at the time, and had sexual relationships with a long list of women.

In his autobiography, he wrote: “I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.” However, he adds, “I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”

As a result, Franklin concluded: “The mere speculative conviction that it was in our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping.”

Franklin was correct: “A right heart exceeds all.” But as he learned from personal experience, no amount of human effort can change the human heart.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God”

If you needed heart surgery, you would consult a heart surgeon. Obviously, you would not think you could change your heart through personal effort, no matter how hard you tried.

It is the same with spiritual heart surgery. If even a person as religiously pious as Nicodemus needed to be “born again” to “see the kingdom of God,” so do you and I (John 3:3). However, if we will pray with David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10), he will answer our prayer. He promises to “give you a new heart” (Ezekiel 36:26) and make you a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). 

The good news is that all who trust in Christ as Lord become “children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

The bad news is that none of us can become God’s children in any other way.

If you have experienced a spiritual “heart transplant,” when last did you thank Jesus for such grace?

When next will you share this grace with the Benjamin Franklins in your life?