100 Tips to Slightly Improve Your Travel Experience: #32 Jet Lag

Researchers tell us to allow one day to recover, for every one hour of change in time zone. This allows our bodies rhythms to sync up with the local time.  So crossing the Atlantic it takes up to six days for our minds and bodies to feel quite right awakening with the rising sun and going to sleep in the falling darkness.  To achieve what for most of us is a normal circadian rhythm.  While our bodies and minds are adjusting we will find ourselves out of sync with sleeping and eating.  

A few ideas for coping. 

Starting adjusting before you leave home.  If you are traveling to an earlier time zone, start getting up an hour earlier, going to bed an hour earlier, and eating meals earlier than you normally would at home.  Start this a few days before leaving.  I have never made this work for more than a couple of hours, but that can dramatically shorten the adjustment time when arriving five or six time zones away.  

There are two schools of thought on what to do when you arrive in a new time zone. Many people advocate for forcing yourself into the local time immediately. Eat meals based on local time, stay awake or go to bed based on the local time. 

For short trips, say a week trip, across the Atlantic with a 5 or 6 hour time change, some say ignore the local time and live on your bodies time.  This can mean waking very early, or sleeping very late.   

What I have found works for me:

• Take it easy the first couple of days.   
• Don't pack the schedule with activities or work.  
• Allow yourself to be early or late as your body dictates.  
• Force yourself to go to sleep at a nearly normal local time. 
• Eat at least a little at "normal" local mealtimes. 
• Get out and see the sunshine, take a walk or a drive.  
• Hydrate, drink plenty of water. 
• Reduce stress, stress and jet lag can run down your body. 

For me it generally takes 2 or 3 days of being kind to myself to adjust to the local time.  I find it easier to adjust going east to west, than west to east, in other words easier returning to north America from Europe, than going from north America to Europe. 

The ultimate way to avoid jet lag, is to drive, or when crossing oceans to take a boat. The slower pace of travel spreads the change over several days, generally at not more than one hour per day. 

Jet lag, is often combined with sleep deprivation, I will talk about overnight flights next week.