The single piece of information most travelers do not have at their fingertips when they travel is what time it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cI just want to shut my eyes for a few minutes,\u201d gambit will fail, and the next thing you know, it\u2019ll be two o\u2019 clock in the mooring, and the score will be jet lag: 1; you: 0.<\/p>\n 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\u2026 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.<\/p>\n Keep going and going and going\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019re filmmakers, after all, and if you don\u2019t have a a laundry list of items to check, organize\u2026 orin our case shoot upon arrival, you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n Coffee, tea or milk? Yes to two of those<\/strong><\/p>\n 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, \u201cI don\u2019t know what coffee, does, but I\u2019m pretty sure that stout it, your head explodes.\u201d I need caffeine to function\u2026 but I need to avoid jet lag even more. Most likely, so do you.<\/p>\n![\"Jet](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/trailheadproductions.com\/palette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/tarmac-copy.jpg\")
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