Sunday March 31 at 2 a.m., it will actually be 3 a.m. Every year since 1976, it's the same refrain and yet, organizations do not always adapt very well to this imposed time difference. Disruption of the internal biological clock increases the risk of sleep disorders, depression, myocardial infarction and stroke.
The transition to summer time is more poorly experienced than the transition to winter time, specialists agree. The neurobiologist Claude Gronfier, also a researcher at Inserm, justifies this by the loss of one hour of sleep and by the fact that the biological clock must be advanced by one hour.
Between 30 and 90 minutes of lack of sleep per day
The lack of sleep among the French population is between 30 and 90 minutes per day. Overall, organisms tend to accumulate “a delay of 10 minutes on their 24-hour cycle”, explains Inserm. From March 31, the body will therefore have to make even more effort to make up for the accumulated delay.
Faced with time change, we are not all equal. Some will take a few days to adapt, others several months. Children, adolescents, night workers and the elderly are generally those who will have the most difficulty adapting.
Also read: Time change: 5 minutes to understand why the end has not yet come
If there were only one left, daylight saving time could win. In 2019, MEPs voted to end the time change from 2021, ultimately postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficulty member states had in reaching agreement. Summer time or winter time? The pendulums are still swinging.