Countering Jet Lag Symptoms By Breaking Your Journey
In its simplest form jet lag arises when you are traveling and the time recorded by your body’s internal clock is out of sync with the local time at your destination. For example, if you depart from London, England, at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok, Thailand, you will land some 13 hours later when the time in London is now 10 am the next morning. But, because you have traveled across several time zones, the local time at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport is now 4 pm that same afternoon.
Having traveled to your hotel, checked in and taken a shower your internal bod clock will now be telling you that it is time to eat. Now, your body clock thinks that it is time for lunch and, despite of the fact that everybody else will be eating dinner, it doesn’t matter to your body clock what you call the meal, it only cares that you eat. So far so good, however, three or four hours later when everybody starts heading for bed your problems will begin because your body clock believes it is now only late afternoon.
A time variation of 6 hours, like that shown in this illustration, is sizeable and most people would experience jet lag. Actually, although an hour or two will hardly produce any effect at all, anything over 4 hours can be expected to produce jet lag symptoms in most of us.
Naturally there are a number of things which you can do before your journey, during the course of your flight and after your arrival at your destination to help to reduce jet lag but one problem which researchers have found recently is that when your internal body clock experiences a substantial shift in time it often overcompensates when adjusting itself and therefore leaves you suffering from a double dose of jet lag before it eventually settles down. So, how do you compensate for this?
To a certain extent you can take this into account and lower your jet lag symptoms by starting to adjust your internal clock before you travel, although your personal 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.
For our illustrative trip to Bangkok this might for example mean breaking your journey half way and resting for a day before continuing on. Air travel might have made the world smaller today but I’m afraid that it is going to take the human body a bit longer to catch up to modern technology.
