Lowering Jet Lag Symptoms By Breaking Up Your Journey
In its simplest form jet lag occurs when you travel and you internal body clock’s time is out of balance with the actual time at your destination. For example, if you depart from London, England, at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok, Thailand, you will land approximately 13 hours later when the time in London is now 10 am the next morning. However, because you have flown across several time zones, local time at Bangkok international airport is now 4 pm that same afternoon.
Having taken a taxi to your hotel, checked in and taken a shower your body will now tell you that it is time to eat. Now, your body clock thinks that it is lunchtime and, despite of the fact that 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 everyone else begins going to bed your problems will begin as your body clock still thinks it is now only late afternoon.
A time variation of 6 hours, such as that shown here, is significant and even the best of us will be experiencing the effects of jet lag. Indeed, while a couple of hours will hardly produce any effect at all, anything over 4 hours can be expected to produce jet lag symptoms in most people.
Of course there are a number of things that you can do prior to your journey, during the course of your flight and at your destination to help to counter jet lag but one problem which researchers have found recently is that whenever your body clock experiences a substantial shift in time it often overcompensates when adjusting and therefore leaves you suffering from a double dose of jet lag before it finally settles down. Against this background, how can you counteract this?
Well, it is possible to take this into account to a certain extent and reduce your jet lag symptoms by starting to adjust your internal clock in advance of travel, although circumstances may make this difficult. An alternative course of action therefore is to simply plan to break your journey whenever you are traveling across more than four or five time zones.
In the case of our illustrative trip to Thailand this might for example mean breaking your journey half way and resting for a day before flying on. Air travel may have made the world smaller today but it will take the human body a little longer to catch up with technology.
