Countering The Symptoms Of Jet Lag By Breaking Your Journey
In its simplest form jet lag occurs when you are traveling and the time recorded by your body’s internal clock is out of balance with the local time at your destination. For instance, if you depart from London at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok you will land approximately 13 hours later at 10 am London time the next morning. But, because you have flown across a number of time zones, the local time at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport is now 4 pm on the day following your departure from London.
After you have traveled to your hotel, checked in had taken a shower your internal bod clock will now be telling you that it is time to eat. Now, your body clock thinks that it is lunchtime and, although everybody else is eating dinner, your internal clock doesn’t mind what you call the meal, it only cares that you eat. At this stage everything is fine, however, three or four hours later when everybody begins heading for bed your problems will start because your body clock still thinks it is now only late afternoon.
A time difference of 6 hours, like that shown here, is substantial and even the best of us will be experiencing the effects of jet lag. Indeed, although an hour or two will hardly be noticeable, anything over about 4 hours can be expected to produce the symptoms of jet lag in most of us.
There are of course a number of things which you can do before your journey, during your flight and at your destination to help to reduce jet lag but one problem which researchers have found recently is that when your internal body clock experiences a substantial shift in time it usually overcompensates when adjusting itself and thus leaves you suffering a double dose of jet lag before it finally settles down. Against this background, how do you compensate for this?
Well, it is possible to take this into account to a certain extent and reduce your jet lag symptoms by beginning to adjust your internal body clock before travelling, although your personal circumstances could make this hard. An alternative course of action therefore is to simply break your journey if you are going to be traveling across more than four or five time zones.
For our illustrative trip to Bangkok this might for example mean breaking your journey half way and relaxing for a day before continuing on. Today’s air travel might have made the world smaller but I’m afraid that it will take the human body a bit longer to catch up with technology.
