Every year, twice a year, the American public willingly participates in one of the oldest and most pointless civic rituals in the modern world. We do not question it. We do not protest it. We simply stumble to the nearest clock (or more accurately, we watch our phone do it automatically) and we accept the new reality as handed down from whatever committee of sleep-deprived bureaucrats has decided, once again, that time itself needs editing.

I have done this my entire life. I have lost sleep over it, literally, and also metaphorically. Once I learned the actual history of Daylight Saving Time, I lost a little more of whatever innocent trust in institutions I had left. Which, at this point, wasn't much.

So let's talk about it. Let's talk about the greatest temporal heist in human history, why the people who invented it were either at war or wanted to play more golf, what it is genuinely doing to your body on a cellular level, and what you can actually do about it. Short of moving to Arizona, which, while tempting, comes with its own set of trade-offs.

A Brief History of a Bad Idea

The mythology of Daylight Saving Time begins, as many American myths do, by incorrectly crediting a Founding Father. Benjamin Franklin, the argument goes, invented DST. This is false. Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay in 1784 suggesting Parisians might save candle money by waking up earlier.[1] It was a joke. The man was trolling Parisians from across the Atlantic, which, honestly, is one of the more underrated achievements of his career. But it was not a proposal to restructure time.

The real origin story is less dignified. The first serious proposal came from a New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson in 1895, who wanted more daylight hours after his shift work to go collect insects.[2] A British builder named William Willett independently lobbied for it around 1907 because he wanted more evening hours to play golf.[3] He spent his own money campaigning for it until he died in 1915, never seeing it enacted.[3]

Let me say that again for the people in the back: a man spent his fortune trying to change time so he could play more golf, and failed. And yet somehow, his idea still ended up restructuring the sleeping and waking patterns of hundreds of millions of people a century later. William Willett lost. His idea won. This is either a cautionary tale about legacy or a very good argument for persistence. I haven't decided which.

The practice was actually implemented by Germany on April 30, 1916, as a wartime coal conservation measure.[4] Not because of farmers. Farmers have always hated DST because the sun does not consult the clock before determining when the dew dries or when the livestock need feeding.[5] Not because of brilliant science. Because of World War I. Britain and most of Europe followed within weeks.[4] The United States adopted it in 1918 for the same reason.[6] And when the war ended, the United States repealed it within seven months because people hated it that much.[6]

Then came World War II. FDR reinstated year-round DST and called it "War Time," which is one of the most on-the-nose government branding exercises in American history.[7] After the war, we were left with no federal standard, resulting in a period of temporal anarchy where a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia crossed seven different time changes.[8] Congress finally standardized it with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, not because it was good policy, but because we had apparently decided that a nation that cannot agree on what time it is cannot be considered a functioning republic.[8] The candy lobby successfully pushed to extend DST through Halloween in 1986 so that children could trick-or-treat in daylight longer.[9] The golf and outdoor recreation lobby pushed further extensions in 2005.[10] I am not making any of this up. Time, it turns out, is a product.

What It Is Actually Doing to You

Now, I want to pause here and say something important. This is not merely inconvenient. This is not the first-world problem it gets treated as. This is a measurable, documented, peer-reviewed assault on your biology, and the science is damning enough that I am genuinely surprised we are still having the conversation.

Your body operates on a circadian rhythm, a roughly 24-hour internal clock governed primarily by light exposure and tied to nearly every system in your body: hormone production, immune function, cardiovascular regulation, metabolism, and cognitive performance. This system is ancient. It is deeply embedded. It does not care about your calendar, your daylight preferences, or the golf industry's Q4 earnings.

When you spring forward, your circadian clock does not move with you. You have socially imposed what researchers call circadian misalignment, the same mechanism that causes jet lag, without the dignity of having gone anywhere interesting.[11] Studies published in Open Heart found that in the days following the spring transition, heart attack rates increase by approximately 24%.[12] Research published in Sleep Medicine documented an 8% spike in ischemic strokes in the days following the change.[13] Fatal car accidents rise measurably.[14] Workplace injuries increase.[15] Your immune system is suppressed. Your cortisol rhythms are disrupted. Mood disorders worsen. Suicide rates tick upward.[16] These are not trivial statistical artifacts. These are real people who died or were seriously harmed because we collectively agreed to move our clocks forward on a Sunday in March for reasons that trace back, ultimately, to a golfer in Edwardian England.

The energy savings argument, the justification that has kept this practice alive longer than any war it was born from, has been essentially dismantled by modern research. Any marginal savings in lighting is offset or exceeded by increased heating, cooling demands, and changed behavior patterns.[17] A 2008 study of Indiana, which had recently adopted statewide DST, found that energy consumption actually increased after adoption.[17] The argument for DST is not only outdated; in some cases it is precisely backwards.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Heart Association, and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms have all formally called for eliminating the time change entirely.[18][19][20] The emerging scientific consensus is not just to eliminate DST, but to stay on permanent standard time. Standard time, aligned closer to solar noon, is more congruent with human biology than permanent DST, despite the fact that most people say they prefer the extra evening light.[21] It is one of those cases where our preferences are calibrated to our convenience rather than our wellbeing, which, as a coach, I find entirely relatable and also somewhat annoying.

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

I want to be practical here. You are not, in the short term, going to abolish Daylight Saving Time, despite the fact that the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022 to do exactly that, which then quietly died in the House because our government's relationship with follow-through is, let's say, aspirational. You are going to spring forward in March, and your body is going to register that as a minor assault, and you are going to live through the consequences.

But you do not have to be passive about it. Here is what the science actually supports:

Start Before It Happens

In the three to five days before the clock change, begin shifting your sleep schedule by fifteen to twenty minutes per night. Go to bed a little earlier, wake up a little earlier. This is the same protocol used to manage jet lag and shift work transitions.[22] You are essentially walking your circadian clock forward so that the official change is a formality rather than a shock. Your body already adjusted. The clock just caught up.

Weaponize Morning Light

Light is the primary zeitgeber, (a rhythmically occurring natural phenomenon which acts as a cue in the regulation of the body's circadian rhythms.) the external cue that resets your circadian clock.[23] In the days following the change, getting bright natural light in your eyes within thirty minutes of waking up is one of the most powerful biological interventions available to you. Not through a window. Outside, or at minimum near a bright open window. Even on a cloudy day, outdoor light is measurably more intense than indoor light. This signals your suprachiasmatic nucleus, the master clock in your hypothalamus, to anchor your rhythm to the new solar schedule.[23] If you want to get aggressive about it, a 10,000 lux light therapy lamp is a legitimate clinical tool and runs about forty dollars.[24]

Guard the First Three Days Like They Matter

The data on cardiovascular events, accidents, and cognitive impairment spikes in the 72 hours following the spring transition.[12][14] During this window, consider being deliberate about not making high-stakes decisions, not scheduling your most demanding work, and being more conservative behind the wheel, particularly on Monday and Tuesday mornings following the change. This is not catastrophizing. This is reading the actuarial tables and acting accordingly, which is what thoughtful people do.

Cut the Evening Light Hard

The flip side of morning light is evening darkness. Melatonin production, the signal that tells your body it is time to sleep, is suppressed by blue light exposure, the kind emitted by every screen you own.[25] In the week around the time change, treating the hour before bed as a light-free or low-light environment accelerates your resynchronization. Use blue light blocking glasses, enable night mode on devices, or simply exercise the ancient and increasingly radical act of sitting somewhere dim and quiet for a while before sleep.

Treat Sleep Like the Performance Variable It Is

Most people have never been asked who they are in a way that required a real answer. The world is extraordinarily skilled at substituting that question with easier ones. What do you do. Where are you from. What do you believe. What do you want. These are all answerable without risk, without revelation, without the particular kind of stillness that the deeper question demands. And so people move through their entire lives fluent in the surface questions, never having sat long enough with the dangerous one, the one that asks not what you perform but what you actually are when the performance stops.

I have spent years in rooms with people who have done everything they were supposed to do. Built the career, the marriage, the reputation. Arrived at the destinations that were supposed to feel like arrival. And when I sit with them long enough, when the social lubrication wears off and the careful presentation softens, something underneath it begins to speak. Not loudly. It almost never speaks loudly. It speaks in the language of low-grade wrongness, in the exhaustion that sleep does not fix, in the quiet and persistent sense that the life being lived, however impressive its coordinates, is slightly off-pitch. Like a note that is close to right but not right. Like a sentence that is grammatically correct but somehow not true.

What I have come to understand, through that work and through the harder work of examining my own life, is that most people are not living their lives. They are maintaining characters. And the character was not chosen consciously. It was built in a moment of necessity, by a nervous system that was doing the only thing it knew how to do, which was keep you safe. The construction was brilliant. The problem is that brilliant constructions have a way of outlasting the dangers that occasioned them. The costume stays on long after the fire goes out. And what was once adaptive becomes, with enough time and enough repetition, the thing you call yourself.

I want to be precise about what I mean, because imprecision here costs everything. A mask is not a behavior. It is not a habit, or a coping mechanism, or a personality trait that shows up on an assessment. A mask is a false identity category. The distinction matters because behaviors can be changed at the level of behavior. Identities cannot. You do not change an identity by adjusting what you do. You change it by seeing what you are. And you cannot see what you are while you are still inside the conviction that the mask is you.

There is a term I use in this work: Resonant Identity. It refers not to the self that was constructed but to the self that existed before the construction began. The self that predates the first wound, the first adaptation, the first moment of heat that sent the nervous system into the business of costume-making. This identity is not built. It is not achieved or assembled or optimized. It is excavated. It was always there. It has been there through every season, every mask, every version of yourself you have presented to every room. The frequency of it has never changed. What has changed is the amount of noise sitting on top of it.

There are eight masks. I have mapped them carefully, and I have watched each one operate across every kind of life imaginable, in boardrooms and bedrooms and sanctuaries, in people who have everything the world calls success and in people who have nothing the world calls anything. The masks do not discriminate. They go wherever survival was once required.

The Relationships Mask says I am who you need me to be. It is the self that learned, early and convincingly, that belonging was conditional. That connection required the management of other people's emotional states. That the safest strategy in any relational room was to read what was needed and become it, quickly and without remainder. This self is extraordinarily good at being present for other people. What it cannot do, what it has never learned to do, is allow other people to be fully present for it. Because full presence requires disclosure. And disclosure requires the belief that the real thing, unmanaged and unpolished, is worth staying for. The Relationships Mask does not carry that belief. It carries the opposite one.

The Religion Mask says I am the good one. It is the self that discovered that moral performance was a form of protection. That if you could be good enough, pure enough, observant enough, you could forestall the punishment that the universe or God or the community might otherwise deliver. This self filters its own prayers. It has developed a sophisticated internal editor that evaluates every authentic impulse against the standard of what the good one would feel, and suppresses what does not pass. The tragedy of this mask is that it pursues connection with the divine through a curated self rather than a true one, and therefore never achieves the connection it is reaching for. You cannot be known through a performance. You can only be known through presence.

The Resume Mask says I am what I achieve. It is the self that converted output into identity so long ago that the conversion is invisible. This self is not ambitious in the ordinary sense. It is not simply driven or hardworking or goal-oriented. It is something more existentially fraught than that. It is a self for whom productivity is not a means but a proof of existence. Stillness does not feel like rest. It feels like erasure. And the question that sits beneath every achievement, the question it runs hard enough and fast enough to never have to stop and face, is this: if I stopped producing, if I had nothing left to show, if the credentials and the accomplishments and the visible evidence of my value all disappeared, would I still be something worth accounting for.

The Recreation Mask says I am fine. It is not the most dramatic of the eight, but it may be the most pervasive, because it is the most socially acceptable. This is the self that has learned to use pleasure, stimulation, and distraction as a management system. Not as enjoyment. Enjoyment is a quality of presence. What this mask practices is the opposite of presence. It is the strategic deployment of sensation to prevent the silence in which the real questions surface. The scroll, the drink, the noise, the constant low-grade entertainment, none of these are leisure. They are a nervous system running from a conversation it is not yet willing to have.

The Rules Mask says I am the compliant one. It is the self for whom structure is not a tool but a lifeline. Somewhere in its history, chaos was real and close, and order was the only available antidote. What it did, brilliantly and necessarily, was build a system of rules, most of them never articulated, never agreed upon by anyone else, that it then lives inside with the conviction of someone who understands that deviation is dangerous. This self is not rigid out of stubbornness. It is rigid out of terror. The inflexibility is not a character flaw. It is a survival strategy that has become indistinguishable from character.

The Responsibilities Mask says I am the dependable one. It is the self that carries everything, and has been carrying everything for so long that the weight no longer registers as weight. It registers as identity. To put something down would not feel like relief. It would feel like abandonment. This self has fused being needed with being valued, and that fusion is so complete that it cannot imagine being loved outside of its usefulness. It mistakes exhaustion for virtue. It mistakes the inability to ask for help for strength. And underneath the unflagging reliability is a question it will not ask directly: if I stopped carrying all of this, if I let other adults be responsible for their own lives, would anyone stay.

The Reasons Mask says I am the logical one. This is the self that retreated into the intellect because the intellect felt safe in a way the body and the heart did not. It can explain everything. It has frameworks for its frameworks. It is often the most articulate person in any room, and the most emotionally unreachable. Not because it does not feel, but because it has learned to translate feelings into concepts before they can arrive as experience. The analysis is not insight. It is insulation. And the cost of that insulation is the kind of loneliness that is particularly acute because it coexists with constant engagement. This self is always in conversation and almost never in contact.

The Roles Mask says I am the part I play. It is the self that has so thoroughly inhabited a title, a function, a social position, that the title and the self have merged. This is not mere professional investment. This is ontological displacement. The role is not something this self does. It is something this self is. And when the role is threatened, when it shifts, when it ends, as all roles eventually do, the crisis is not logistical. It is existential. Because the question on the other side of the role is not what do I do now. It is who am I now. And the Roles Mask has never prepared an answer.

Underneath every one of these masks is what I call an emotional contract. It is a sentence formed in a moment of heat, before there was the maturity or the safety or the language to examine it, and it sounds like this: I will be the one who blank so I never have to feel blank again. You did not choose this contract in any meaningful sense of the word choose. It was written by a nervous system under duress, ratified by repetition, and enforced by the remarkable human capacity to mistake the familiar for the true. And no one ever came back, in the days and years after the moment of its formation, to tell you that the danger had passed. No one sat with you and said: that strategy worked, you survived, and you are no longer required to pay its terms.

So you kept paying. Year after year,

There are poems that decorate language, and then there are poems that indict the soul. Dylan Thomas’ villanelle, written in 1951 as his father was going blind and approaching death, is not merely a meditation on mortality; it is a structured rebellion against diminishment. The villanelle form itself, with its nineteen lines and two refrains braided through the body of the poem, is a discipline of return. The repetition is not aesthetic flourish; it is insistence. “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” are not suggestions. They are commands placed in a liturgical rhythm, forcing the reader into confrontation with entropy. Thomas concedes that “dark is right,” acknowledging the inevitability of death, yet he refuses passivity in the face of it. The poem is not anti-death; it is anti-surrender. It audits a life for unused voltage.

I was reminded of it in Interstellar, where the poem is recited as humanity stands on the brink of extinction. The film situates the lines within cosmic scale: a dying Earth, a species suffocating under dust and inevitability. Yet the true battlefield is not astrophysical; it is existential. The characters are not merely fighting gravity; they are fighting resignation. When the poem surfaces in that narrative, it is not sentimental. It is defiant. It becomes a manifesto for agency in the face of collapse. Watching it, I did not experience nostalgia for the poem. I experienced recognition. The lines were not new to me, but they struck with renewed force because they intersected a season of my own life where the greater danger was not catastrophe but quiet compromise.

Thomas categorizes men—wise, good, wild, grave—and exposes a shared regret. Not that they died, but that they did not burn as brightly as they could have. The wise lacked lightning in their words. The good saw their deeds as frail. The wild misjudged the sun. The grave discovered too late that blind eyes could blaze. The poem is a taxonomy of underutilized fire. It is not concerned with chronology but with congruence. Did you live aligned with your capacity, or did you negotiate with diminishment? That question has shaped my own frameworks for years. Identity, as I teach it, is not constructed by preference but discovered through resonance. Misalignment produces anxiety because the self knows when it has compromised. The dying of the light is not age; it is the gradual agreement to become less than what you know yourself to be.

When I read Thomas now, I do not hear mere rage. I hear oxygen. Rage, in this context, is not emotional volatility; it is refusal to cooperate with internal decay. It is breath forced back into embers. The repetition in the villanelle mirrors the discipline I demand of myself and those I coach: return again and again to what is true. Do not drift. Do not soften into palatability. Do not spiritualize passivity as wisdom. The poem’s plea to the father—“Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears”—is not melodrama; it is a demand for witnessed aliveness. Even tears are preferable to numbness. Even grief signals presence. I have learned that the greatest threat to the soul is not suffering but sedation.

There was a moment in my own life when the cold of metal in my hand felt like an exit from suffocation, when I nearly chose silence over fire. The temptation was not dramatic; it was quiet. To go gentle. To fade into compliance with expectations that were never truly mine. That is the good night Thomas warns against. It is not the grave; it is the slow surrender of identity before the body has finished breathing. The poem confronts me because it names the very thing I refuse: a life audited at the end with the realization that my words forked no lightning. If there is rage in me, it is disciplined. It is the structured refusal to dim. It is breath as covenant with presence. It is the insistence that the light entrusted to me will not cooperate with entropy until it has exhausted its purpose.

And so I stand in congruence with Thomas, not as a romantic of rebellion but as a steward of intensity. I do not deny that dark is right. Night comes. Bodies age. Systems fail. Civilizations dust. But there is a way to approach the close of day that is aligned, clear, and fiercely alive. To burn without apology. To speak without dilution. To love without negotiation. To build without shrinking to accommodate comfort. The poem does not allow distance. It corners the reader and demands an answer: where have you already begun to fade?

If I am honest, the question steals my breath because it leaves no refuge in abstraction. It forces inventory. Where have I mistaken maturity for withdrawal? Where have I labeled exhaustion as wisdom? Where have I allowed the edges of my conviction to dull in exchange for ease? The poem will not permit me to look away. It presses until the lungs expand and the pulse quickens. It is not asking whether I will die. It is asking whether I will live congruently until I do.

And that is the landing.

Not theatrical rage. Not denial of limits. But a disciplined blaze that refuses premature surrender. A life so aligned that when night finally arrives, it finds no unused fire left in the chamber.

I nearly breathed right out of the point. Love.

Not the sentimental kind. Not the fragile version that begs to be held. I am speaking of the kind that burns without asking permission. The kind that does not dim itself to remain tolerable. The kind that does not negotiate with fear. I almost missed it because I was so focused on fire that I forgot what fire is for.

The poem is not a manifesto for anger. It is a defense of love. Why rage against the dying of the light? Because light reveals. Because light warms. Because light makes growth possible. Because without it, nothing lives. The refusal to go gentle is not ego clinging to relevance; it is love refusing to abandon its assignment. If I dim, those entrusted to my light lose warmth. If I soften into resignation, the spaces I was meant to ignite remain cold.

Love is the point.

Not performance. Not legacy. Not even impact in the abstract. Love is the animating force behind the blaze. When Thomas pleads with his father to rage, he is not asking him to defeat death. He is asking him to remain present. To remain fierce. To remain engaged in relationship until the final breath. Rage, in that context, is relational intensity. It is love refusing to withdraw.

There was a season where I confused fatigue with surrender. Where I nearly exhaled my conviction into the dark. But what stopped me was not pride. It was love. Love for my children. Love for the truth. Love for the work entrusted to my hands. Love for the version of myself that I had finally uncovered beneath expectation and fear. I could not dim because love would not permit it.

And here is the reality that lands hard.

If love is the point, then gentleness at the wrong time is betrayal. To fade when you are called to burn is not humility; it is abandonment. To shrink when you are meant to stand is not wisdom; it is fear dressed in spiritual language. Love demands presence. It demands oxygen. It demands fire disciplined and directed toward life.

So I will not rage for ego. I will not burn for spectacle. I will burn because I love.

And when the night finally comes, it will not find me dimmed by compromise. It will find me emptied of unused fire, having loved without retreat, having stood without dilution, having given the full measure of light entrusted to me.

Love is the point.

And that is why I will not go gentle.

____

Do not go gentle into that good night - Dylan Thomas 1914 – 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.