This year, as it did last year, the state legislature will consider a bill that would do away with daylight saving time in Washington. And this year, as it did last year, that bill will likely die in committee. This is a good thing.

That’s not to say daylight saving time has any intrinsic value now though. Sure, the later summer sunsets are nice—stop saying we “gain an hour”; no matter what we do to the clock, we can’t slow the earth’s rotation—but the toll exerted on our bodies negates any recreational benefit. “Our biological clock just hasn’t evolved to go through these one-hour switches every six months or so,” says Dr. Horacio de la Iglesia, a professor in the University of Washington’s biology department. “So every time we go back and forth one hour, we put a little bit of a strain on the system.”

And it’s not just a nebulous feeling of being off, due to going to bed at a different time. There’s a chemical process at work. Specifically, the biannual clock cluster messes with when we create melatonin, the neurohormone produced during sleep that helps regulate our circadian rhythms. 

Consider the shift we make in spring, traditionally the more difficult of the two: By jumping forward, we get more sunlight—at least in those parts of the country where it’s sunny in March—at the end of the day, when we should be winding down indoors, busily producing melatonin. “When you travel one time zone to the east or west, you adjust in a day,” says Dr. Al Lewy, director of the sleep and mood disorders laboratory at Oregon Health and Science University. Which makes sense, because whether you’re in Seattle or Salt Lake City, your clock will say the same thing when the sun rises. “But,” Lewy continues, “the new light-dark cycle we experience after a time shift perversely acts against us.”

When it was instituted 98 years ago, daylight saving time had at least some quantifiable justification, which is to say it saved the public money. The country was at war, resources were scarce, and, the thinking went, pushing clocks ahead one hour would mean Americans would be able to keep the lights off longer. One year later, with the war over, Congress repealed the Daylight Saving Act—over president Woodrow Wilson’s veto—and temporal sanity was restored.

But in the ’30s “fast time,” as it was known then, crept back into favor, with states and even cities adopting it independent of one another and with varying stop and start dates. For the next 30 years chaos reigned, particularly in uniquely screwy Washington state. The Seattle City Council voted to reinstate DST in 1933, only to have the public vote to do away with it again the following year. WWII prompted a nationwide adoption from 1942 to 1945, and then in 1948 the Seattle city council brought it back again. Four years later a state initiative decreed that Washington would revert full time to standard time. Then another state initiative reinstated daylight saving time in 1960. 

It wasn’t until 1966, when president Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act, that the entire country got on the same page. And that act didn’t come an hour too soon, so to speak. As an April 1963 Seattle Times article reported, a bus driver in the eastern United States would routinely pass through seven time zones on a 35-mile route running from Ohio to West Virginia. Seven!

The only flaw in the Uniform Time Act? (Assuming you haven’t pitched a tent in the states’ rights camp.) A state can remain on standard time all year. Which is why, in 2016, we find ourselves on the verge of descending into another timepocalypse. As of late January, 10 state legislatures were debating time-zone-related bills. (Two states are already on year-round standard time: Arizona axed DST in 1968, and Hawaii never bothered to adopt it.)

“People are passionate about this,” says Ray Harwood, of the blog timezonereport.com. The Phoenix resident has tracked DST-related legislation since early 2015, when an Arizona state senator tried unsuccessfully to reinstate it. Harwood won’t hazard a guess as to why so many states have decided they no longer want to save daylight, but he does have a pretty strong opinion about what will happen if any of them succeeds. “You’re going to have time zone nightmares across the country for decades as people flip back and forth.”

Think about that the next time you’re planning a cross-country bus trip.