Jet lag is the many headed hydra of both domestic and international travel. It can take over your trip in as little as two time zones, and it can eat away at either your business or your leisure travel. Jet lag, though, is a beast that can be tamed.
I live in San Francisco, but most of my family is on the other side of the United States, so finding ways to deal with jet lag has been a major preoccupation over the years. Additionally, as a reporter for more than a decade, and then a traveling producer after that, business can hardly be restricted to one time zone. Sometimes you have to be on a plane. A lot of sometimes, actually. Now, with a documentary including eight international locales in production, finding ways to tamp down the effects of jet lag is a very big deal. My crew and I just don’t have time for the old adage that recovering from jet lag takes one day for every time zone you cross. Here’s how I’ve learned to deal with it over the years.
Know before you go
The single piece of information most travelers do not have at their fingertips when they travel is what time it’s going to be when they arrive at their final destination, or if they do know it, not to plan for the implications. You should account for tie zone changes when you book your flight. Barring last minute business travel, personal emergencies and of course the availability of flights from your departure city, thesis the single best piece of information you can should try to control in order to avoid jet lag.
In a perfect world, you want to arrive in the mid-morning hours, because your goal upon arriving is the ability to make it through a regular day without succumbing to the temptation to take a nap or sleep at an irregular hour. It never fails, the “I just want to shut my eyes for a few minutes,” gambit will fail, and the next thing you know, it’ll be two o’ clock in the mooring, and the score will be jet lag: 1; you: 0.
My colleague and I just flew from San Francisco to Adelaide, Australia, which had us in transit for almost thirty hours, including seventeen hours of time in the air, and our jet lag factor was zero. How did we do it? The bulk of our flying time was in the overnight hours… even with the fifteen hour time difference between the west coast of the United States and our arrival city in the state of South Australia. We left the United States at 8:30 at night, but we arrived in Melbourne for our connecting flight to Adelaide at just shy of 6:00 in the morning. We slept, for us, a ridiculously large amount of the flight – almost ten hours of sack time – but by the time we actually touched down in Adelaide (around 10 in the morning), we were ready to go, since our body clocks were waking up at the asme time as the part of the world we were in which we were landing. It bears repeating: our number one priority when booking the flights was to line up as nearly as possible our regular sleep time with the sleep time of the county we were to which traveling, and to sleep accordingly. You should try to adopt the same strategy.
Keep going and going and going…
Easier said than done, but your role model at the beginning of your trip should be the Energizer bunny. Now, I should say that it was hardly that we weren’t at all tired on that recent trip to Australia. Thirty hours of travel time, most of it in economy class, is going to take its toll, but we knew that it was going to be better to find ourselves completely wiped out at the end of an Australian workday and ready for bed with the rest of the Aussies, rather than to sleep during the day, and take forever for our body clocks to catch up over the next few days. So we did everything in our power to stay up until what would approach our regular end of the full day. Granted, we had a lot to keep us busy. We’re filmmakers, after all, and if you don’t have a a laundry list of items to check, organize… orin our case shoot upon arrival, you’re probably doing it wrong. However, we were able to work what for us was a light day (since our main goal was still just to stay awake), and when we finally called it a night, it was in fact actually night. We woke up the next day more than ready to go.
Coffee, tea or milk? Yes to two of those
This is going to be the hardest piece of advice for many travelers, including me, to follow, and I sympathize. To quote a line from the classic television show, Newsradio, “I don’t know what coffee, does, but I’m pretty sure that stout it, your head explodes.” I need caffeine to function… but I need to avoid jet lag even more. Most likely, so do you.
You’re going to need to figure out a way to survive without caffeine and alcohol on your long haul flights. This is essential. Caffeine and alcohol dehydrate you. A lot. What’s that, you say? You’ll just drink a lot of water? I don’t know how much water you’re planning on drinking on your flight, but so far, I haven’t found the right amount that compensates for the natural dehydration you’ll encounter anyway in a dry cabin and the additial effects of caffeine and alcohol on your system, but if you’e found it… congratulations, you glorious freak of nature. Turning your body into a mini Mojave, is inviting jet lag to come on in and take a seat. Whether you start weaning yourself off coffee a few days before your flight or quit cold truly, I can tell you that if my flight is longer than five hours, I’m nixing the caffeine until I’m safely and soundly where I want to be. How well you’re able to obey the directive will determine how miserable you are when you arrive.
I also want to add a word or two about supplements. Ideally, sunlight is your best friend, but it can be in short supply on long haul flights around the country or around the world. Personally, I’ve found melatonin or vitamin D supplements to be useful additions in my travel utility belt. However, not only is every person different, we’re starting to get into that vague world of medical and nutritional advice, and I just don’t have the chops. Some people will tell you that supplements, that they can only help, are harmless and that you don’t need to worry about professional advice. Unless you know you’re taking placebos, you should always keep in mind that anything your’e adding to your body is… well, something you’re adding to your body. When it doubt, ask someone with an M.D. after their name about anything you plan to add to your diet before, after or during your travels, and this goes double for anything you’re considering to help you sleep or help you stay awake.
The good news you should take away from this is jet lag is not a given. Yes, it’s easier to deal with on travel going from east to west than west to east, because it’s easier to plan your arrival for those critical mid-morning hours and still get your normal amount of sleep, but you can take steps to bat jet lag away. You can manage your travel in a way that allows you to get on with your travel life, leaving the jet lag beast where it belongs… far away from you.
Onwards!
