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.

Jet Lag Is Part Of Life For Frequent Fliers

Dealing with jet lag is not too hard for those of us who only fly once in a while, perhaps once or twice a year on holiday or for the odd business trip, but for aircrews and regular long-haul fliers, jet lag often brings several health problems which can become more or less permanent.

Long-haul travelers will be familiar with the disturbance to their sleep pattern and the insomnia that can be produced by a long trip, in addition to such things as changes in mood, irritability, stomach problems and difficulty in handling information. But, for the very frequent flyer these often transient symptoms become a part of everyday life and are regularly joined by menstrual cycle problems for women and also by short-term psychiatric disturbances for a few individuals. So how do you go about managing jet lag?

The main factors that influence the degree of jet lag that you experience, apart from how often you travel, are the distances traveled, the direction in which you travel and your age.

If you regularly travel across only two or three world time zones then any affects will probably be very mild. But, as soon as you start to cross more than three time zones, and especially once you get up to frequently traveling across six or more time zones, jet lag symptoms will start to increase significantly.

The symptoms of jet lag are also more noticeable when you are traveling east and tend to affect you less when flying west. If you travel from London to Singapore on holiday for instance you will experience more jet lag when you arrive in Singapore at the start of your holiday than you will in London when you return home.

In general when you fly east you can expect that jet lag will last for a few days and a good guide is approximately two thirds of the number of time zones crossed. For example, if you cross six time zones you may expect jet lag to affect you for up to four days. When flying west jet lag could be expected to last about half of this time.

Age is also a significant factor when it comes to jet lag and, as you get older, you will discover that you are affected more and more by jet lag.

A true jet lag cure does not exist but there is a lot that you can do to help in reducing jet lag symptoms.

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