This is the weekend when most of us will be just a bit grumpier, more confused and sleep-deprived than usual. And all because of a pointless, and frankly dangerous, exercise that we put ourselves through twice a year.

We speak, of course, about the semi-annual changing of the clocks. Sunday at 2 a.m. marks the start of Daylight Saving Time, when most Canadians (the sensible folk of Saskatchewan excepted) “spring forward” by moving our timepieces ahead an hour and thereby losing 60 minutes out of an otherwise perfectly good weekend.

On Sunday, Nov. 1, unless we come to our collective senses before then, we’ll go through it all again in reverse, with the illusory promise that we’re “gaining back” that lost hour.

This never made any sense, not when daylight saving was introduced back in 1918 as a “temporary” wartime measure designed to save energy, and certainly not now.

In fact, the evidence is mounting that this practice isn’t just futile (it does not, in fact, save energy) but positively noxious.

Sleep researchers (who didn’t even exist when DST was conceived) are unanimous: moving clocks ahead puts us out of sync with our internal circadian clocks, which are built into our every cell and keep us harmonized with the natural cycle of light and dark. Even worse is switching clocks back and forth twice a year.

We are, in short, messing with our most fundamental biological rhythms, which regulate such basic functions as heart rate and hormone levels. “It’s a general stress on the physiology,” Till Roenneberg, a leading German researcher and president of the grandly named World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology, tells the Wall Street Journal.

No wonder recent studies have found a 5- to 15-per-cent increased risk of heart attack in the first few days after the switch to daylight savings. Another study finds an 8-per-cent increase in the rate of strokes in the first two days (though that evens out in the following week). We’re doing all this to ourselves, for no good reason.

Those who gripe about changing the clocks have traditionally been dismissed as cranks, akin to anti-metric hold-outs. But there are encouraging signs that logic and the mounting evidence of science are shaking more of us out of our chronological complacency.

Consider: in the past year or so alone, the European Parliament has voted to scrap daylight saving by 2021 — though national governments still have the final decision. When the EU held a public consultation, an overwhelming 84 per cent favoured ending DST.

At least nine U.S. states (including Washington and Oregon) have passed laws to end the clock changes and stay on DST year-round. Many others, including California, are at various stages of debating such a move.

Closer to home, Yukon has ended the switch. It will stay on DST after a final “spring forward” move this weekend. The B.C. legislature passed a law last fall to follow suit, though the government doesn’t want to go ahead until the Pacific coast states do the same. A whopping 94 per cent of British Columbians consulted supported ending the twice-yearly switch.

So why no action? The big hang-up is that the U.S. Congress is the ultimate arbiter on this issue. States can’t get out of the time-change trap without federal permission, and provinces don’t want to find themselves an hour ahead or behind their neighbours to the south. So we’re stuck while Congress busies itself with other matters, like impeaching their president.

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Ultimately, logic and science must prevail. Surely we will come to our senses and end this madness of switching back and forth in defiance of all evidence and our biological natures. We will look back on this century-long folly and wonder what on earth we were thinking.

It’s only a matter of time.