Use trickery sheets to icon out exactly when and how to treat jet lag using light exposure and light avoidance at specific times of the day, based on which direction you’re going and how many time zones you cross.
“Jet lag is a manna to quotidian biologists considering the disruption of mental and physical well-being immediately highlights the importance of our internal ‘body clock,’” the focus of their work. Much of the unstipulated malaise we may experience on long journeys may just be “so-called ‘travel fatigue,’” which can occur “regardless of the mode of transport and the number of time zones crossed,” leaving people feeling disorientated, often weary, and headachy.
Dehydration has been blamed. The air circulated in the cabins of commercial airlines is pretty dry, but plane though it can make your throat, skin, and vision feel dry, the maximum loss of fluid through vapor and sweat, for instance, wouldn’t be increasingly than well-nigh an uneaten half cup if you unquestionably did the math. So, it isn’t as though you’re in Death Valley or the Sahara when on a flight. “Further, the numbering assumes that the passenger would be nude,” and I’m sure the airline would tuition you uneaten for that!
Of course, “airplane food—if any is served—tends to be starchy and sugary,” and giving passengers salty snacks like pretzels during a flight doesn’t help. “The vegetarian…special meals are sometimes an improvement, but you must order them in advance. BYOF—bring your own fruit—is a good rule to fly by. A small bag of unsalted almonds or walnuts is a healthy volitional to those skimpy tons of salted peanuts.”
The motel air isn’t just dry, though; it’s moreover low in oxygen pressure, well-nigh what you’d get at 10,000 feet whilom sea level, which is well-nigh twice as upper as Denver. That vacated can make you finger lousy. Then, when you land, if you’ve crossed unbearable time zones, you can suffer from jet lag.
Jet lag is the temporary disconnect between the new time at your destination and that of your own internal soul clock, which is still on home time. “This desynchrony is abnormal,” since our internal clock is normally synced to the outside world. Symptoms of jet lag do go away, though, as your soul becomes hip to the new time. The “duration of jet lag in days can be calculated to be two-thirds the number of time zones crossed eastwards, compared with half the number of zones crossed westwards.”
Let’s squint at an example. As you can see unelevated and at 2:04 in my in my video How to Treat Jet Lag with Light, London is six time zones eastward from Chicago.
So, without flying there, it may take four days surpassing you get when to normal—six eastward time zones multiplied by two-thirds. On the other hand, Londoners flying westward to Chicago should get over their jet lag in only three days—six westward time zones divided by two. The reason it’s easier to go westward, where the day is longer, than it is to go eastward, is considering our internal clock is naturally set for longer than 24 hours—“closer to 25 h,” in fact—and has to be reset every day. “It is for this reason that the observed rhythms are tabbed quotidian (from the Latin: well-nigh a day.”
Interestingly, you can see this in Major League Baseball performance. Researchers churned through 40,000 games, mining 20 seasons, and found “surprisingly specific effects of quotidian misalignment [jet lag] on sturdy performance under natural conditions.” Indeed, the “jet-lag effects were largely vestige without eastward travel with very limited effects without westward travel, resulting with the >24-h period length of the human quotidian clock.” Okay, so how do you treat it?
As you can see unelevated and at 3:05 in my video, you first need to decide whether it needs to be treated at all. If you’re just traveling over one or two time zones, you don’t have to worry well-nigh it. If you’re crossing three or increasingly time zones, for instance traveling tailspin to coast, jet lag “will be experienced,” so it then depends on how long you plan on staying. If only for a few days, it’s probably not worth treating, considering you’ll then have to switch when as soon as you return home. “In these cases,” if you have tenancy over your schedule, though, it’s largest to “time appointments in the new time zone to coincide with daytime in the home zone that has been left, and to stave times that coincide with night on ‘body time.’” So, it’s pretty much worldwide sense: If you travel east, your soul will still think it should be sleeping in the morning, so you should push your activities to later in the day, and vice versa. But, if you are going to be gone for a while, for a week or more, for example, you can retread your soul clock using behavioral methods and/or drugs, supplements, or foods.
“There is only one sure fire way to stave jet lag perfectly and that is to adapt to the new time zone surpassing flight,” meaning surpassing you leave on your trip. Changing your home sleep schedule increasingly than two hours, however, can be “counter-productive,” considering it will interfere with your pre-trip sleep and you don’t want to go into a long trip once sleep-deprived. In fact, surpassing your trip, you want to maximize your sleep. In flight, as you can see unelevated and at 4:12 in my video, the recommendation is for “immediate welding to destination meal and light schedule,” although this is easier said than done. Then, once you land, you want to “attempt to maintain destination sleep schedule.” Try not to nap for increasingly than 15 to 30 minutes, and don’t momentum virtually when your soul thinks it’s the middle of the night.
The real key to treating jet lag, however, is light therapy. Traveling eastward, you expose yourself to the unexceptionable light in the morning and stave unexceptionable light in the evening. The opposite is the specimen when traveling westward—“evening exposure to unexceptionable light; morning avoidance of unexceptionable light…” Seems simple, right? It’s unquestionably a bit increasingly complicated than that. “The translating changes…if you’ve traveling through increasingly than six time zones—say from Boston to Athens. Your biological clock may retread in the wrong direction, reacting to light in the morning as if it were afternoon.” Okay, but what if I tell you it’s plane more complicated than that! “The effects of light acting upon the soul clock” are unquestionably only during a specific window virtually the time your soul temperature bottoms out, which is usually virtually 4 AM. As part of our quotidian rhythm, our soul temperature typically drops from 98.6 degrees lanugo to increasingly like 97.6 degrees, plane when we aren’t sleeping, as you can see unelevated and at 5:02 in my video.
What’s the marrow line? I full-length two trickery sheets at 5:12 in my video, which you can see below. Snap a picture or screengrab them for future reference. If you fly eastward wideness eight time zones from Los Angeles to London, for example, on day one, you should stave light between 6 AM and noon local time and then expose yourself to light between noon and 6 PM. local time. The rest of that first day, your light exposure won’t matter and won’t stupefy you either way. “On subsequent days, the local times of light avoidance and exposure need to be wide older by 1 – 2 h each day until light avoidance coincides with nocturnal sleep,” that is, when you’re sleeping at night.
But, on those first few days without traveling eastward, note that you’ll want to stave morning light, which “can be difficult to achieve, particularly on the day of arrival, since many flights are overnight and land in the morning…” One thing you can do is wear really visionless glasses until you get indoors. Of course, if they’re too dark, you can’t really drive, which is when those not-so-attractive orange lenses that woodcut undecorous wavelengths can come in handy, as they prevent the dip in melatonin you can get with regular sunglasses, as you can see unelevated and at 6:09 in my video. Regardless, the next day, you might have the urge to get “out and about,” but that could unquestionably make your jet lag worse by taking you in the opposite direction.
What well-nigh if you’re flying eastward increasingly than eight time zones? In that case, you subtract the number from 24 and treat it as travel westward. For instance, an eastward trip wideness ten time zones—New York to Delhi, say—should be treated as a westward flight, requiring a wait of the soul clock wideness 14 time zones. In that case, it would be easy to get outside and get some sun, but what would you do if you just went four zones westward and needed to get light in the middle of the night?
One gadget visitor came up with light-emitting headphones, which you can see unelevated and at 6:57 in my video. The theory is that you could bathe your smart-ass in light directly through the ear canals. Researchers stuck them on the heads of cadavers and did seem to get some light penetration, but you don’t know…until you put it to the test. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial demonstrated that “transcranial unexceptionable light exposure via the ear canals alleviates jet lag symptoms.” Or…you could just turn on a lamp.
