HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – While many admit they enjoy the extra hour of sleep that comes with falling back, they also dread the 4:30 pm sunsets that arrive in late November and early December. Whether you would rather fall back, spring forward, or keep everything the same, one thing is certain: almost everyone has a stance on the daylight debate.

“I think I would rather spring forward and stay there,” says Henderson resident Reece O’Nan. “I think that it makes life easier. I know that switching shifts for some shift workers is difficult. It’s just better overall. I mean it allows my body to stay on one schedule.”

Annalisa Thewis agrees, saying she also prefers later sunsets that come with daylight time.

“I would prefer more light on the back-end of the day,” explains Thewis. But for Thewis, co-owner of the Antler coffee shop in downtown Henderson, the business aspect complicates this debate.

“We open really early,” says Thewis. “So when it’s dark out, that customer base begins later than it does in the Summer. So from a business standpoint I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, bring the light on the front-end of the day’, but also, from a personal standpoint, when we leave work at 3:30 and you have like 45 minutes until the sun is noticeably starting to descend, that’s a little bit discouraging.”

Thewis says the impact time changes have on her business are “visible.”

“In the Summer, we open at 7, service begins at 7. Whereas in the Winters, we have about an hour and a half to two hours until people start really coming back out into the world,” says Thewis.

In early 2023, some U.S. politicians proposed making daylight time permanent, meaning clocks spring forward and never change again. Others, like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, want to make standard time permanent. Sleep experts with the University of Michigan agree.

“The reason is that internal clock that circadian rhythm, it’s longer than 24 hours,” says Dr. Cathy Goldstein, a sleep neurologist at the University of Michigan. “So, it’s easier for us to stay up late and sleep in. But what keeps us a line to the 24-hour day wakes us up in the morning is getting morning sunlight.”

But with two young children, O’Nan says the benefit of “falling back” does not apply.

“It’ll wake them up earlier,” says O’Nan, “so as a parent, I don’t get it.”