Here's how to outsmart jet lag

[reader]

The following article was posted on the National Public Radio (US) website last year. It examines a lot of contributing factors, some of which we have control over--food, alcohol, sleep aids and pre-flight preparations. It also looks those we have little or no influence over. It may not change your life but it may affect how you feel after arriving.

From NPR

If you're trying to squeeze some travel into the last few weeks of summer, you'll want to get the most out of your vacation. And nothing ruins a trip to the Louvre or a scuba-diving excursion like your body telling you it's time for bed NOW. So can you "hack" jet lag, so to speak? Or at least mitigate it?

We posed the question to NPR's International Desk and got an array of helpful answers from our globetrotting staff.

For instance, NPR producer Greg Dixon is enthusiastic about an app for jet lag called Time Shifter. "You input your travel schedule and it spits out a plan for a couple days before and a couple days after your flights, advising you when to get/avoid natural light, drink coffee, take melatonin, etc.," Greg writes. "It has worked really, really well."

Research on jet lag is limited, and most of it is on athletes, who — much like NPR's journalists — are expected to jet across time zones and perform at their best. A recent consensus statement to help athletes manage jet lag and travel fatigue in the journal Sports Medicine, offers few guiding principles.

David Stevens, a physiologist from Adelaide, Australia, who co-authored the statement while working at a sleep research center at Flinders University, breaks it down. First off, you'll want to understand the workings of your body's circadian rhythms, that is, our internal clock that tells us when it's time to fall asleep and when to wake up.

Then you can take advantage of what sleep researchers call zeitgebers or time-givers, external factors that set the pace of these rhythms. Light is the most important one but exercise, meals and even social cues can also trigger sleepiness or wakefulness.

Whether you use an app or not, Stevens suggests starting your time zone adjustment a few days before your trip begins. "One of your best strategies to prepare for any westward travel is you just go to sleep, for example, an hour later each night," Stevens says. And go ahead and allow yourself to stay in bed an hour later each morning as well.

Things get tougher when you're heading eastward. "It's brutal from west to east. It usually takes me 10 days to adjust, say from Washington to Tokyo," writes NPR's Asia editor Vincent Ni.

Stevens says there's a simple explanation for this. Going to bed later than normal – as you do when traveling westward – is relatively easy for our body clocks to understand, because you get more tired in the evening. "My body's going, hang on, you're meant to be asleep now, why aren't you asleep?" he says.

But when you travel eastward, you have to try to go to sleep when you're not yet tired, and that's just... confusing to your circadian clock, Stevens says. "The body's going, hang on, you're not meant to be asleep yet. What are you doing?" And to make matters worse, one of the body's peak performance times, when we're naturally most alert, is around 7 p.m., he adds.

So in these cases, Stevens says, prep a few days before your trip by going to sleep earlier than normal and getting up early to take in lots of morning light.

Continues at

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/20/1194877864/jetlag-cures-symptoms-travel-sleep-app

[floridarob]

I'm a vampire no matter what time zone I'm in...rarely do long flights affect or change that.... missing an afternoon nap is what throws me off the most.

[Travelingguy]

I am going to be using the Timeshifter app for a trip to Europe in August. I did a fair amount of research on this and I have high hopes for this. The reviews are quite positive if you follow their instructions. The idea of being able to arrive in Europe or Asia and come off the plane without jet lag is extremely enticing to me.

[vinapu]

15 hours ago, reader said:

one of the body's peak performance times, when we're naturally most alert, is around 7 p.m., he adds.

 

definitely not my case, jet lag or domestication, 6-9 pm are my worst times and don't even try to call me at that time to ask if you can borrow 1000 baht or something

[floridarob]

4 hours ago, vinapu said:

6-9

🤫

[vinapu]

9 hours ago, floridarob said:

🤫

hungry people always think about the bread

[10tazione]

Flying from Europe to Thailand, for me the best thing is to take an overnight flight where I can try to sleep according to night time in Thailand.
Leaving Europe around 5/6 pm local time (or 10/11 pm Thai time) and arriving in Thailand say 8/9 am Thai time is perfect; I can sleep about 5 hours of the 10/11 h flight which is good to be fit enough on the first day in Thailand. I never have jet lag in this case.
The worst thing for me is to take Qatar and having to change plane in the middle of the night in Doha and arriving sleep deprived in the afternoon in Thailand.

[Travelingguy]

There is fatigue and tiredness. And then there’s Jetlag. One can be fatigued and tired from traveling as well as a lack of sleep. That can resolve with one nights sleep.

 

But the jet lag is actually a different thing. Jetlag can take one day for every hour of time difference to make the adjustment. Jet lag  is mostly related to our internal clock, and that is most affected by light exposure, whether we are able to sleep or not. There has been a lot of research and science done on the subject. The way to avoid jet lag is proper exposure or lack of exposure to light at the correct times to prevent jet lag. This needs to begin a couple of days before the trip. Being exposed to light at the wrong times can actually make Jet lag worse. 

[unicorn]

When going to Europe, we take a late afternoon flight, then some hypnotics and booze so we can sleep on our way there, arriving in the morning in Europe. 2 days of methylphenidate in the morning will keep up us during our first couple of days. On the way back, noonish flight from Europe gets us at LAX after rush hour. Just stay up until evening-time, and conked out until morning. Rarely need drugs on the way back to Los Angeles. 

[reader]

16 hours ago, unicorn said:

 Rarely need drugs on the way back to Los Angeles. 

 

[vinapu]

I posted it somewhere already but repeat, Prestige massage by Chong Nonsi station offers treatment called "Jet Lag Recovery" at 1950 for 90 minutes and 2150 for 2 hrs.

Hopefully somebody will try it and tells us  that it works 

[fedssocr]

when possible I try to arrive in Asia late evening so I can just go right to bed. Europe from US East coast is the worst for me since most flights arrive early in the morning and are too short to really get much sleep. 

Typically I find the jet lag worst on day 2