You gain an hour’s sleep tonight, but don’t stay awake tossing and turning and worrying about it.
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But you will. It will take you about two days to adjust your body clock to your watch; getting up in the morning when it’s lighter than usual and eating dinner when your stomach says you should have had afternoon tea an hour or so ago.
Academic analysis of daylight savings is still very much divided – much like our nation until this weekend when, at last, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia catch up again.
But there’s one phenomenon on which most studies seem to agree; these changes of time twice a year do have an odd impact.
The US Claremont McKenna College found that at the start of daylight savings when people lose an hour’s sleep there’s usually a small lift in things such as accident rates, a drop in workplace productivity, an increase in kids’ “scratchiness”; the sort of stuff which comes from losing sleep.
So, we should be calmer, more productive and less accident-prone after tonight, right?
Sadly, no. People don’t take well to being tossed out of bed when it’s darker than their body expects it to be, and it leads to … a lift in accident rates, a drop in workplace productivity, an increase in kids’ “scratchiness”.
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You may be one of the tens of thousands of Bendigo shoppers who were a bit miffed that hot cross buns and chocolate eggs appeared in shops the week after Christmas.
It seems some of our supermarkets and suppliers think it’s a bit risky to mention Easter, and are labelling their wares as just “eggs, mini eggs, buttons”.
It’s Egg Season apparently, rather than the traditional Christian or even non-Christian celebration of renewal and rebirth.
We guess though that it’s difficult to explain to people from other cultures why we link egg-shapes, rabbits, chickens, silver foil, mountains of chocolate, and flavoured buns with a deeply religious festival.
Dear old Facebook this week helped us all come to a new understanding of this odd mix of symbols and livestock … by posting a video of a real live rabbit trying to mate with a real live chook.