Daylight Saving Time Ends: What Time The Sun Sets In Austin

AUSTIN, TX — It’s nearly time to fall back for daylight saving time, a biannual custom that has come into greater focus — and mounting criticism — in a year suffused with anxiety given the coronavirus pandemic.

Critics of the tactic of setting clocks back cite altered sleep patterns as a main reason to abolish the practice. The chorus of criticism has grown this year in particular given the metaphoric darkness that has beset the landscape amid a global pandemic that has limited our activities and substantially alerted our routines.

But time — and time changes in turning back the clock by an hour, ostensibly implemented to make better use of daylight — stops for no one. And so, come Nov. 1, we all will be compelled to set our clocks back by one hour at 2 a.m. (or, really, just before going to bed). This also is called Fall Back and Winter Time, as explained in the website timeandate.com.

Nov. 1 is the earliest date possible for the end of daylight saving time, which officially occurs at 2 a.m. during normal sleeping hours. But let’s be real — there’s nothing normal about 2020 or the sleep schedules many of us are keeping, and those dynamics have heightened arguments proposing that Congress should make the switch back to permanent standard time.

Many involved in the field of mental health are among the critics of falling back and springing forward given heightened anxiety in a year that has seen pandemic-related restrictions, job loss and corrosive economic effects of a scourge unseen in our lifetimes. Already-altered routines spurred by pandemic are further altered with such time changes, many argue.

In a mid-July KFF Tacking Poll, 53 percent U.S. adults said their mental health had been negatively affected due to worry and stress over the pandemic, a jump of more than 20 points from March, when the national mental health advocacy nonprofit added the question to polling.

The poll revealed some other mental health red flags: 36 percent had difficulty sleeping; 32 percent had difficulty eating; 12 percent increased their use of alcohol or drugs; and 12 percent said chronic conditions had worsened due to worry and stress over the coronavirus.

Consider, too, that winter depression is a real phenomenon, even absent a pandemic of illness. The days will continue to get shorter as we move toward the winter solstice on Dec. 21; and falling back to standard time makes the change more abrupt, triggering for many seasonal affective disorder (with the apt acronym of SAD), a type of depression that occurs during the late fall and early winter.

The exact cause of SAD isn’t known, but research suggests limited sunlight is a reason, and the symptoms usually dissipate as the days grow longer and daylight saving time returns on the first Sunday in March.

“SAD is not a minor condition, but because people typically experience it only during certain months, they don't see it as a serious issue. However, it is imperative to treat,” Dr. Paolo Cassano, a psychiatrist who specializes in low-level-light therapy at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, told Harvard Health Publishing.

The pandemic has energized a movement to make daylight saving time permanent. A growing number of states have passed legislation to do away with time changes outright, including: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Vermont, as ABC News reported. Similar legislation has been struck down in Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, according to the report.

A couple of states have opted not to observe daylight saving time: Hawaii and Arizona eschew the practice save for the Navajo Nation in the northeastern part of the latter state, according to NASA. California's voters authorized year-round DST in 2018, but action on the referendum is still pending in their state Legislature.

Don't mess with Texas time

In Texas, efforts were bolstered last year to end daylight saving time when state lawmakers filed bills in the House and Senate to abolish the practice altogether. Arguments against the ritual ran the gamut, from its inconvenience to the anachronistic nature of the custom dating to World War I. Others invoked the specter of schoolchildren forced to wait outdoors at the bus stop super early in the morning when it's still dark, and the parental plight of putting the kiddos to bed while it's still light outside.

State Sen. Jose Menéndez, a Democrat from San Antonio, is among the most vocal critics of DST, arguing the practice is out of sync with modern society and norms. His opposition is such that he has carried a bill to exempt Texas from daylight saving time in the upper chamber since 2015, as the Texas Tribune reported.

House Bill 150 in 2015 aimed to abolish daylight saving time, with an amendment to set Eastern Standard Time as “Texas time,” the Tribune reported at the time. "That would mean all Texans would have to make adjustments, rather than the state picking one of the time zones already in its boundaries," the Tribune observed. While the bill came closer to becoming law than other daylight saving time proposals in recent years, it ultimately did not pass.

That bill's failure is not unique. Similar bills have been proposed unsuccessfully for at least two decades, the Tribune reported.

DST loathing is bipartisan. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Menéndez, State Rep. Lyle Larson detailed his made his dislike widely known in a widely distributed op/ed titled "Daylight Saving Time Is a Nonsensical Ritual" that ran in the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers statewide.

Larson, a Republican from San Antonio, went way back in arguing against the idea, noting its origins in a 1784 satirical essay by Benjamin Franklin in a French newspaper positing that Parisians could save $200 million through "...the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” In citing such provenance, Larson was suggesting in a not-too-subtle way that the original reason for daylight saving time was to save money on candles when electricity did not yet exist.

The representative also cited the negligible energy-saving benefits inherent to the practice. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy assessed the effect of observing daylight saving time on national energy consumption, he wrote, finding that resetting clocks amounts to a reduction in total energy consumption of 0.02 percent. The study also determined that sticking with one time could actually save approximately 0.5 percent of electricity per day nationwide, Larson wrote.

During the legislative session that ended in May 2019, legislation was filed "...seeking to end this primitive practice," Larson recalled. Joint resolution 117, if passed, would have allowed Texans the opportunity to vote whether to stay on standard time year-round or daylight saving time year-round, he explained. But the bill never was referred to a committee after passing the House in a 133-9 vote. "The proposal died in the Senate without even a word spoken about it on the Senate floor," Larson wrote with palpable frustration.

Yet Larson and his like-minded colleagues are undaunted: "Though we were unsuccessful in our quest to give you, Texas voters, a chance to finally end the illogical practice of changing our clocks, we are moving forward with plans to file the legislation again in the 87th Legislative Session, which begins in 2021," he wrote. "In the meantime, we urge you to contact your state legislators, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, and Gov. [Greg] Abbott to implore them to move this legislation forward next session."

So the fight in Texas against daylight saving time continues. Remember the Alamo? For now, remember the still à la mode practice of setting back those clocks. And don't forget: Sunset in Austin on Nov. 1 is 5:43 p.m.

This article originally appeared on the Austin Patch