Crossing 3 or more time zones often means 2 things: great adventure and jet lag.
It doesn’t matter how many times you have experienced a time shift. If you don’t take action, symptoms like sleepiness, nausea, mood swings, or insomnia could spoil the first few days of your vacation or business trip.
However, if you play it smart, the transition to another time zone can be almost seamless. To prepare and intervene, we will use :
- Knowledge about circadian rhythms and sleep physiology
- Protocols of professional athletes and sports teams
- Andrew Huberman advice
With these scientific but easy tips, you can, and you will beat jet lag on your next trip.
In This Article
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5 Tips To Avoid Jet Lag:
Prepare and shift your clock in advance
Preparation before the journey is important. The tickets, passports, visas, packing your bag, there’s a lot. Whether you’re going on a spontaneous trip in a few days or you were planning it months in advance. If you find some time to prepare for jet lag, it’ll do wonders.
Step 1: look up the time difference between your current location and your destination.
We will use these for illustration: Madrid to Tokyo (7 hours difference, Tokyo is ahead),
London to Los Angeles (8 hours difference, London is ahead)
Step 2: shift your day closer to the destination’s schedule.
Start 2 – 3 days before leaving. The strongest weapon you have here is light exposure. You can find out more about how this works in the Huberman podcast. We will focus on practical advice and simplify a lot.
The most important thing is timing. We can divide the day as follows: 6 hours after your minimum core body temperature (2 hours before you wake up on average), 12 hours dead zone, 6 hours before your minimum core body temperature.
The dead zone is the part of the day when light or darkness doesn’t affect your sleep cycle.
Exposure to bright light, ideally sunlight, for at least 30 minutes in the first part of the day will shift your clock backward, which means you should be able to go to sleep and wake up earlier. Staying in the dark or wearing sunglasses will do the opposite.
Exposure to bright light in the last part of the day, especially 1-2 hours before sleep, will shift your clock forward. Staying in the dark will do the opposite.
You can also try a cold shower in the morning to shift backward (the body reacts by heating itself, therefore warming up from the core body minimum faster). Vice versa, try a hot shower in the morning to shift forward (the body cools itself after, therefore postponing temperature rise after waking up)
Overview on examples:
Flying from Madrid to Tokyo
Bedtime in Tokyo is 3pm Madrid time. That means I need to shift backward. Of course, I won’t be sleeping in the afternoon; I just want to get closer. Let’s say I go to sleep at 8 pm, then at 6 or 7 pm.
After waking up (at my regular time or a little earlier), I should get as much sunlight or artificial light as possible in the next 3 to 4 hours. Then, in the evening, from 6pm, I’ll avoid natural light and keep the lighting indoors low. I can use Melatonin before going to bed; more about this will be discussed later.
Flying from London to Los Angeles
Bedtime in Los Angeles is my London wake-up time, 6am. I need to shift forward. This might be undoable for me if I need to wake up to work. But if possible, I’ll go to sleep 2 to 3 hours later. I’ll use artificial lights on maximum 3 to 1 hour before going to sleep.
After I wake up, I want to avoid as much light as possible for the first part of the day. I can also use Melatonin right after waking up. Remember, you can still get as much sunlight as you want in the dead zone.
With this technique, you should shift your body clock as close as possible to the destination time.
Sleep smart during your travel
Flying, checking in, and switching airports can be tiring, but it’s just the airport. The goal is not to be tired at the final destination. That means playing it smart.
Don’t sleep randomly. Try to sleep only when there is a night at the final destination. Naps under 30 minutes are okay. Fighting the urge to sleep on a 12-hour flight might be hard, but arriving at the destination in the evening after sleeping 6 hours on a plane will ruin your next few days.
Don’t eat at the destination’s night time
It‘s advised to skip the meal served at the destination night time. The 24-hour rhythm control is not isolated just to our brain. It is assumed every cell in our body keeps track of the day/night cycle.
There is strong evidence of an internal clock in the liver. Eating a meal sends a signal about activity to the liver. So unless you eat normally at 2 am, don’t do it at 2 am destination time.
Hydrate
Lots of issues after a long transfer can be attributed to travel fatigue. Headache, irritability, and tiredness can be felt even after flying south or north and staying in the same time zone.
Drinking plenty of water is crucial for sustaining high energy levels and preventing medical problems. Read more about essential tips while traveling by plane.
Don’t drink alcohol
Whether you’re stressed or you’re on your way to a bachelor party, you should always avoid drinking alcohol while flying (long distances). There are many reasons why, but to name a few: it dehydrates you, irritates your stomach, and worsens sleep quality.
Alcohol in small doses is excitating; in larger amounts, it sedates. Using alcohol to put yourself to sleep might work, but you won’t feel rested. Moreover, you raise the chances of adverse effects such as deep vein thrombosis and headache.
5 Tips To Overcome Jet lag:
Get sunlight and shade at the right time
Some people might say that all you need to do after you arrive to adjust is get outside, catch the sunlight, walk on the grass or sand, and connect to the new place. While this can certainly have psychological and spiritual value, in some cases, it can move your internal clock in the wrong direction.
Follow the advice above to shift using sunlight exposure.
Get light right after waking up and stay inside, or use sunglasses in the evening to go to sleep and wake up earlier.
Hide from the light in the morning and expose your eyes to the natural or artificial light in the evening to fall asleep and wake up later.
Use caffeine and other stimulants
Resist the urge to sleep during the day in the new time zone. Keep yourself up by staying active, working out, and drinking coffee or strong tea. If you prefer supplements, use slow-release caffeine. You can have a nap or even a couple of them; just don’t let them last longer than half an hour.
Use Melatonin
(at the right time and under the right circumstances)
Melatonin is a hormone produced in the pineal gland. It is a dark or night signal to the center for circadian rhythms. As always in biology, it has lots of other functions, and it isn’t perfectly understood yet.
However, from the data we have, I would advise not to administer it to pregnant women. I would be hesitant to supplement children, people with epilepsy, and those using Warfarin. For others, it‘s relatively safe with a low frequency of side effects, including headache, nausea, and sleepiness.
Simplifying, we can view Melatonin as an antagonist (acting against) of light. We can apply the same logic as we did for the timing of light exposure.
To go to sleep earlier, take melatonin in the evening 1-2 hours before the desired bedtime; to postpone sleep, take melatonin after waking up. There is no recommended dosage, but around 2mg should be safe and enough. You shouldn’t take more than 10mg a day. The dose on the label and the actual content of the pill can differ. Because of that, try to buy from reputable brands.
Always consult your physician before adding or removing anything from your medication.
Choose the shift direction based on your chronotype
The maximum time shift from your internal clock is 12 hours (one way or the other). If the time difference is 16 hours forward, act and shift like it’s 8 hours backward. If you crossed 10-14 time zones, choose the direction in which you will shift.
If you’re a morning person, shift toward morning. If you’re more of a night person, shift toward the end of the day, even if the time difference is slightly bigger this way.
Stay on your home schedule
You should stay on your home schedule if you:
- travel 1 – 2 days (roundtrip)
- don’t have meetings, work, or other tasks scheduled at the time you expect to sleep
- can actually commit yourself to following the home time zone; this means using light and dark, as explained before
I hope you will avoid jet lag and enjoy you’re next trip as much as possible by following these advices!
If you want to learn more about jet lag and circadian rhythms, read this blog post.
If you want to learn about sleep overall, I highly recommend the book Why we sleep by Matthew Walker.
Resources
Waterhouse, J., Reilly, T., Atkinson, G., & Edwards, B. (2007). Jet lag: trends and coping strategies. Lancet (London, England), 369(9567), 1117–1129. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60529-7
Sack R. L. (2009). The pathophysiology of jet lag. Travel medicine and infectious disease, 7(2), 102–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmaid.2009.01.006
Arendt J. (2009). Managing jet lag: Some of the problems and possible new solutions. Sleep medicine reviews, 13(4), 249–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2008.07.011
Janse van Rensburg, D. C., Jansen van Rensburg, A., Fowler, P. M., Bender, A. M., Stevens, D., Sullivan, K. O., Fullagar, H. H. K., Alonso, J. M., Biggins, M., Claassen-Smithers, A., Collins, R., Dohi, M., Driller, M. W., Dunican, I. C., Gupta, L., Halson, S. L., Lastella, M., Miles, K. H., Nedelec, M., Page, T., … Botha, T. (2021). Managing Travel Fatigue and Jet Lag in Athletes: A Review and Consensus Statement. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 51(10), 2029–2050. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01502-0
Disclaimer:
The information provided in this blog post is for general informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any health problem. The use or reliance on any information provided in this blog post is solely at your own risk.
