Posts Tagged ‘no jet lag’

This year many thousands of people will be flying off to far flung corners of the globe to lie on sun soaked tropical beach, to backpack through some of world’s most beautiful wilderness countryside, to visit some of the architectural wonders of our planet or to merely explore new countries and cultures. And, sadly, many thousands of us will discover that the first few days of our holiday are lost trying to recover from jet lag.

But does jet lag have to be an inevitable part of modern long-haul travel?

The answer to this particular depends very much on where you are flying to. For example, if you begin your journey in Melbourne, Australia and fly to Kobe, Japan then you are not going to experience any jet lag at all because, even though you are flying thousands of miles, your journey essentially takes you due north so that both your departure point and arrival point are in the same time zone. If however you fly from say Melbourne to London, England then you will travel east to west across ten standard time zones and will definitely suffer from jet lag.

Jet lag is merely the result of your body clock being out of step with local time and, while your internal body clock will naturally adjust itself to come into line with local time, this adjustment takes a bit of time.

If you are traveling across just two or three time zones then the time difference experienced will be small enough that you will probably not really notice it and your internal clock will adjust itself relatively quickly. However, if you travel across more than four time zones then the difference will be noticeable and your body clock will take longer and longer to adjust as you travel across an increasing number of time zones.

In our previous example of flying from Australia to London your internal clock will need several days to adjust itself fully and, while it is adjusting, you are very likely to find yourself suffering from insomnia, finding it hard to fall asleep at night and to get up in the morning, feeling tired during the day, possibly experiencing problems with eating with nausea, stomach upset, a headache, dehydration, and much more.

So exactly what can you do to counter this?

There are many ‘traditional’ cures for jet lag including jet lag diets, over-the-counter medication, sleeping pills, melatonin and much more and each of these has both its champions and critics, but do these so-called cures actually work?

The simple answer to this question is no. These so-called jet lag remedies are not effective and, in a lot of cases, will make your jet lag worse.

Coping with jet lag is not a matter of turning to pills and formulas, but is a matter of devising a plan focusing on your specific travel plans and your lifestyle that helps your body’s natural process of adjusting its own internal body clock. This means taking a number of steps in preparation for your journey, as well as during your flight and after your arrival at your destination. In some instances these will be sufficient for you to avoid jet lag completely while, in other cases, they will certainly help to reduce the effects of jet lag greatly.