My Time Zone Can Beat Up Your Time Zone

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

-Benjamin Franklin

Quiet, serene, peaceful, and full of turkeys (open to interpretation)—I live in a great region of the country. Our remaining forests are beautiful and full of cute critters and colorful plant life. White pine, western larch, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine dominate the landscape and provide habitat for all the cuddly forest dwellers. I love trees and don’t think I could be happy without them. To brag a little more we have big mountains, gorgeous valleys, and clean rivers and lakes galore.

Now on to the people. If I were to paint everyone with the same brush, I would say the people of northeastern Washington are honest, distrusting of outsiders, humble, hardworking, and overly afraid of the government invoking a police state. Not too bad, really. I’ve been to much less-likable places. The county does a good job plowing our roads during the winter. Our property taxes are quite less than that of economically and educationally superior Spokane County. And our local building department will look the other way on that new shop if it isn’t visible from the main road.

So while thinking about some of the niceties of my rural community I came up with another one that is usually overlooked. One that is so ignored I’ve not seen it noted on real estate listings, job advertisements, or tourist destinations. I love my time zone. I’m on Pacific Standard Time, of course, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. My time zone rocks.

This may sound silly to some, but my time zone is very important and directly affects my quality of life. If you’re thinking that all time zones are the same and that they are in place to account for a round planet circling and spinning around the sun, then you are only partially correct.

I’m a sports nut. I love competition—meaningful competition—and I love my teams. So I can’t be made fun of, I’m not going to mention who my favorite teams are, but I love competition. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s the NFL, pickleball, curling, or ballroom dancing. If talented people are competing and they are competing their hardest then I can get into it. The bad side to this is that I watch a bit too much televised athletics. I admit it.

I have a schedule where I go to bed early and wake up early, just like Benjamin Franklin advised. Can you believe that people in New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago sometimes have to stay up until midnight or later to watch their teams play. That sounds absolutely horrible. I rarely stay up past ten o’clock, even on the weekends. If I lived in New York I guess I’d have to get a DVR and then be one of those guys who tells people not to talk about the game until I have a chance to watch it. Those guys are annoying.

As someone who works in the health and fitness field I advocate getting a full night’s sleep. Some people function perfectly fine on five or six hours but not me. I feel great on eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and that’s when I wake up smiling and ready to take on all obstacles. If I were to watch the Bears (oops) on Monday night and the game didn’t end until midnight I would scarcely get four hours of sleep. I’d be a zombie. I’d have to get a new job or, even worse, not watch my beloved Bears that night.

Now that I’ve proclaimed my love for Pacific Standard Time it’s now the moment for me to discuss another time related topic—daylight savings time (DST). Many of the people I know and work with haven’t a clue what daylight savings time is actually for and believe it’s a big government conspiracy to make them either one hour late or one hour early for everything. Al Gore probably had something to do with it, suggested one co-worker.

I’m here to tell you that the purpose of daylight savings time—which begins in Spring and ends in Fall, not the other way around—is to give people more daylight during the evening hours. For the US this only works during the summer months when the days are long, hence DST ends in the fall. DST in the United States began back in 1918. The reason being that since most people work during the day they would appreciate an extra hour of daylight once their workday concludes. Some proponents of DST are convenience stores, outdoor recreation venues, and tourism operators. More daylight hours after the typical workday ends results in more revenue for these types of establishments. Opponents of DST consist of farmers, movie theatres, and television stations. Farmers tend to not like their animals’ schedules getting messed with and television providers don’t want people outside during evening hours.

Not all states participate in DST. Indiana, home to many farmers, did not start “springing forward and falling back” until just 2006. My wife’s family is largely from the Hoosier State and on the eve of changing their clocks for the first time a relative called my wife in a tizzy hoping for some answers from an experienced DSTer. “Why do I have to do this? What if I forget? What is going to happen to this hour? Is it just going to disappear? Why is Al Gore doing this to us?”

Crossing time zones is a drag and jet lag is a real bummer. It takes time to adjust to a new zone. Experts say it can take up to one day for the human body to adapt to every one hour of time zone change. So if I were to travel to the southern tip of Africa my body could take up to ten days to feel normal again. And no matter what the energy drink companies might tell us, there is no magic solution of sugar, caffeine, acai, and more sugar that can help alleviate jet lag. There are no magic pills either, but that doesn’t mean travelers don’t have options.

When my wife and I lived in Montana her parents drove west to watch her graduate. They don’t travel out of their time zone very often and doing so was a big deal. Leaving their time zone was unsettling and disconcerting for them. The way they remedied this was by forgoing Montana time and sticking with Indiana time. They ate dinner when most people were pouring their first cocktail, went to bed when dessert trays appeared, and woke up with the newspaper delivery boy. A little strange, some might say, but no jet lag and no feelings of lethargy, headaches, or light-headedness.

I found my in-laws devotion to their time zone quite respectable and even honorable. Being that it was only a couple hours difference they didn’t cause any inconvenience for anyone else. And they did this for troublesome Eastern Standard Time. I live in a much better zone than they do so the next time I travel in the US it’s going to be Pacific Standard Time all the way (and all day) to show my dedication to my time zone.

Happy Travels.