Jet lag is an ugly thing.
Jet lag is for weaklings.
As with most of the human condition, reality is found between these two extremes.
You fly through 10 time zones and land in Timbuktu only to become a dazed halfwit who sleeps all day and prowls restlessly through the night.
Or you speed merrily around the world, touch ground with an adventurous spring in your step, and glide out vigorously into our glorious, interesting planet.
“I never have jet lag,” a brazen young software sales exec told me once at an aviation industry conference. “Ever. Fly a million miles a year, have clients in 27 countries, been in every time zone … no jet lag.”
He didn’t actually live anywhere, he explained rather vaingloriously. Kept a few belongings in his parents’ garage in Florida. Post office box in New Jersey. Two hundred flights per year, 220 hotel rooms. Bank accounts in Singapore, Zurich, and New York City … you get the picture.
He was a presenter. He’d been in London six hours, inbound from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and was admirably lucid.
I had arrived in London the morning before, met a client for lunch, checked into a hotel, and went to sleep at 6 p.m. Yuck—wide awake at 2 a.m. I “worked” until breakfast, then trundled myself and my bag three miles on foot across London so I could stay awake. I listened to a panel discussion on global distribution systems (this did not help the staying awake problem), had a quick dinner with another client, and collapsed in bed at 7:30 p.m. … only to wake pitifully at 3 a.m., which was 7 p.m. back home.
My jet-lag-proof acquaintance sprinted back to Heathrow Airport, hopped on a plane to Shanghai, and signed a contract for a $3 million software installation the next day. Supposedly. Meanwhile, I finally adjusted two days later and saw an awesome production of “Macbeth” at the National Theatre … only to go through the same weary process on my trip home after a week in the UK.
What’s going on? The human body wasn’t designed by nature for us to hop across the planet like frogs. Our circadian rhythms are powerful, and we’re lucky they are—it’s how we make physiological and psychological sense of Earth’s rotation. Cross multiple time zones quickly, and the result is sleep disturbance, fatigue, confusion, crankiness, and more. No human faced jet lag until the dawn of the jet age … at which time jet lag not only sprang into existence, but also entered medical jargon: circadian rhythm sleep disorder.
It’s disorderly, all right. If you’re awake, read on.
Go West, Young Traveler
It’s easier flying west than east. Most observers figure that this is because your psyche/metabolism can adapt to a long day better than to a missing day. You can’t force yourself to fall asleep, but you can fight to stay awake. In my experience, this is true. But there is still a pretty big problem.
You can’t always fly west.
Well, you can, technically, if you want to cross Earth’s biggest ocean—and the international date line to boot. So, instead of 10 hours to Paris, it’s 25 hours, not to mention the addition of an entire calendar day when you cross the date line.
Heaven help transpacific travelers heading east: Not only do you surrender 10 hours to the ether, but also, crossing the date line means that you may arrive back in the United States before you left Asia. Zounds! Your body is confused. Your intellect is brutalized: Take off from Tokyo early Wednesday, arrive in San Francisco late on Tuesday.
Here Comes the Sun
Our complex physiologies mostly measure time by daylight. Makes sense: Humankind evolved on this sunlit planet. So exposure to daylight is often reckoned a key factor in jet lag or lack of the same. That’s the good news.
Bad news is, the actual parameters of this can be as complex as quantum mechanics. When you arrive in X, experts advise, expose yourself to daylight in the late morning (not dawn or late afternoon) for Y minutes. If you are in Z, the advice is different. North Pole, different still. Read all about it at the Mayo Clinic website’s entry on jet lag. If you grasp it all, please write to me and explain.
Experienced global travelers often advise: If it’s light out, stay awake; if it’s dark, sleep. This simple axiom has many speed bumps, such as traveling to the far north in midsummer (Norway, say), and offers no answer to the sleep problems that underlie the whole syndrome.
It Gets Tougher as You Age
Sorry, this is the truth of it. Thirty years ago, at the start of my global gallivanting, it was fairly easy to recover on first arriving in Vienna, say: Stay awake as long as possible, then go to bed and sleep through the night. I once slept 14 hours straight, which is a lifetime record for me. I have little hope of doing that anymore.
Sleeping on Long-Haul Flights Is Sketchy at Best
If you’re in coach, the human body is not designed to sleep sitting up. Even if you have a lie-flat seat, distractions abound: people talking, kids squalling, pilot announcements, dishes clanking, toilets flushing, and turbulence.
And these days the intercontinental in-flight entertainment is wickedly alluring. Free streaming! All you want! Stuff you’ll never see at home. I once binged an entire season of “Game of Thrones” on an 11-hour flight from London to Los Angeles.
Just try your best. Watch one (just one! I mean it) movie while you’re having dinner, then lie back and snooze however much you can. If you arrive the next day truly rested, thank your lucky stars.
Drugs Are a Poor Answer
Whether on the plane or once you’ve arrived, pharmaceutical assistance is dancing with the devil. Even melatonin, the supposedly “mild” and “natural” supplement, is marginally effective and has side effects that include, yay, confusion. The very sensible Mayo Clinic website doesn’t rule it out but urges small doses. My experience bears this out.
Stronger sleep medications are downright dangerous. The best-known have been linked to car crashes, brutal withdrawal, and more. I may suffer the consequences of jet lag, but poisoning my body is even worse.
Alcohol causes nothing but trouble all around.
So What’s a Body to Do?
Try to sleep as much as you can eastbound (and pull every string you can to get in business class). Then stay awake as long as you can during the new day in your destination—go for a walk, visit a museum, or go out to dinner. Then go to bed as close to your regular time as possible. In other words, pretend that you’re transiting a shorter but otherwise ordinary day. You’re fooling your circadian rhythms, but it’s a worthy scam.
Westbound, it’s the opposite: Stay awake on the flight as much as possible; that’s what all that free in-flight entertainment is good for, even if it does rot your brain. When you arrive back home, have dinner and go to bed as near to your regular time as you can.
In both directions, when sleep overwhelms you, resist but not to extremes: Sleep is crucial to overall well-being. If you do wake up, lie quietly (this doesn’t mean grabbing your device for a supposedly short session of Candy Crush Saga) and call on whatever still-mind practices you have. If that fails, pursue some moderate beneficial activity for a while. My very enterprising and practical wife, Nicole, once led me on a lovely walk along the shores of Lake Geneva at 2 a.m. … after which we slept until breakfast.
Are There Wackier Ideas?
Some frequent travelers urge you to adjust your food cycle … the No. 2 circadian rhythm, supposedly. Figure out when breakfast is at your destination, have a big meal on the plane at that time, and away you go. Fast for at least 16 hours beforehand. I don’t plan to try this out.
Some suggest no sleeping on planes at all, ever. I doubt whether they’ve been on a 16-hour flight to Dubai.
“Just act like a man and deal with it!” a supposed travel expert wrote on Reddit. No comment needed.
Whether you are felled by jet lag or resistant to it, please be kind and patient with yourself and those around you. I cannot be like that young global software salesman, and I’m fine with that. I believe that karma awaits those who look down on jet lag sufferers.
The bottom line is, there’s no magic way around it. Remember, this is the price we pay for the precious gift of exploring our planet and our civilizations.
Let me leave you with Albert Einstein’s famous aphorism: “The only reason for time to exist is so everything doesn’t happen at once.”
He was baffled by time, so it’s no surprise we are.
