Magazine
How to Handle Jet Lag, According to Very Frequent Travelers
A long flight can be exhausting, but recovering from it needn’t take up half your trip.
Fatigue, irritability, dehydration, brain fog: these are just a few of the unpleasant side effects of taking a far-flung trip, though even jumping a couple of time zones within the United States can wreak havoc on energy levels. Purported remedies for jet lag abound, but here are a few tried-and-true methods that can help you feel better faster — without drinking multiple espressos upon landing.
Credit…Ilya Milstein
How to Prepare Before You Leave
“Jet lag is primarily caused by circadian desynchrony — a misalignment of the biological clock with sun time — which leads to problems with sleep and alertness, as well as other somatic symptoms,” says Dr. Vishesh Kapur, 62, thefounder of the Sleep Medicine Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. In other words, your circadian rhythm, which is typically in tied to the natural light and darkness of a day, is thrown off in a foreign environment.
Managing jet lag, therefore, often comes down to manipulating your body’s exposure to light. “If possible, changing your biological clock time to more closely match the destination’s daytime will make the transition smoother,” says Kapur. He suggests online tools like Jet Lag Rooster that allow a traveler to enter flight locations and times to get personalized instructions for how to do this. But as a rule of thumb, it takes about a day per hour to adjust to a new time zone. For example, if you’re flying from Los Angeles to New York, which is three hours ahead, you’d ideally wake up 30 minutes to an hour earlier and earlier for three consecutive days before your flight and expose yourself to natural sunlight upon waking.
According to Kapur, “It’s also important to not start out sleep deprived, which will increase the fatigue and sleepiness associated with jet lag.” But the architect Mariam Issoufou, 45, who travels between New York (where she has a design studio), Switzerland (where she is a professor of architecture and sustainability at ETH Zurich) and Niamey, Niger (where her company is headquartered), says that being tired out can also help. “I exhaust myself the day of or the day before a flight, often by exercising, so that when I get on the plane I can go straight to sleep.”
