Don’t forget to Fall Back

Despite efforts to permanently end daylight saving time in Florida and beyond its time to Fall Back. Daylight saving time 2023 officially ends at 2 a.m. ET Sunday, Nov. 5, the first Sunday after Halloween.

 Essentially, we gain an hour of sleep through the night and return to standard time.

Benjamin Franklin first introduced the idea of daylight saving time in a 1784 essay titled “An Economical Project.” After being unpleasantly stirred from sleep at 6 a.m. by the summer sun, the founding father penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” 

The modern concept is credited to George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, who in 1895 “proposed a two-hour time shift so he’d have more after-work hours of sunshine to go bug hunting.

In the early 1970s, America was facing an energy crisis so the government tried an experiment. Congress passed a law to make Daylight Savings Time permanent year round, but just for two years. The thinking was more sunlight in the evening would reduce the nation’s energy consumption.

Until Congress gives the OK to “lock the clock,” Floridians will still have to shift their clocks.

Moving our clocks in either direction changes the principal time cue — light — for setting and resetting our 24-hour natural cycle, or circadian rhythm. In doing so, our internal clock becomes out of sync or mismatched with our current day-night cycle. How well we adapt to this depends on several things.

Light is the principal environmental cue. Light suppresses the release of the sleep-inducing substance melatonin. So it’s important to expose yourself to the light during the waking hours as much as possible — and to avoid bright light when it is dark outside

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