Overcoming Jet Lag

This year many thousands of people will be flying off to the four corners of the globe to lie on a tropical beach and soak up the sun, to hike through some of the most beautiful of the world's wilderness areas, to explore some of the wonders of our planet or to merely explore new countries and cultures. And, regrettably, tens of thousands of us are also going to discover that the first one or two days of our holiday are lost trying to get over jet lag.

However is jet lag an unavoidable part of long-haul travel?

The answer to this question is very much dependent upon where you are flying from and to. For example, if you start your journey in Brisbane, Australia and fly to Kobe, Japan then you will not experience jet lag because, even though you are traveling thousands of miles, your journey essentially takes you due north so that both your departure point and destination are in the same time zone. If however you fly from Brisbane to London, England then you will travel east to west across ten time zones and will certainly suffer from jet lag.

Jet lag is merely the result of your body clock getting out of step with local time and, although your internal body clock will naturally adjust itself to match the local time, this adjustment takes time.

If you are flying across just two or three time zones then the time difference experienced will be small enough that you probably will not notice it greatly and your internal clock will adjust itself relatively fast. If however you fly across four or more time zones then the difference is going to be significant and your body clock will take longer and longer to adjust as you fly across an increasing number of time zones.

In our example of traveling from Australia to London your body clock will need several days to adjust and, while it is adjusting, you are likely to find yourself suffering from insomnia, finding it hard to fall asleep at night and to wake up in the morning, feeling tired through the day, possibly experiencing difficulty in eating with nausea, stomach upset, a headache, dehydration, and a great deal more.

So exactly what can be done?

There are many 'traditional' remedies for jet lag including jet lag diets, over-the-counter medication, sleeping pills, melatonin and much more and each of these has both its champions and detractors, but are these 'traditional' remedies the answer?

Put simply the answer to this question is no. These so-called jet lag remedies are not effective and, in many cases, will make your jet lag worse.

Curing jet lag is not a matter of pills and formulas, but is a matter of devising a plan focusing on your particular travel plans and your lifestyle that assists your body's natural process of adjusting its own internal clock. This means taking a series of steps before your departure, as well as en-route and at your destination. In some cases these steps will be sufficient for you to avoid jet lag completely and, in others, they will undoubtedly reduce the effects of jet lag to a large extent.