How to deal with Jet Lag – Best strategies

Whether if you are heading off to Bali for a month or if you have found a cheap flight to Dubai for the weekend, jet lag (also called ‘’travel fatigue’’) can easily ruin your enthusiasm and inflate your holidays with exhaustion. Trust us, you don’t want that! 

In this post we will clarify what is Jet Lag, what exactly happens with your body, and strategies to prevent or deal with Jet Lag. Dive in and you won’t have to deal with jet lag again!

What is Jet Lag?

Jet Lag is a sleep disorder due to the temporary disconnect between your new destination’s time and your own internal body clock time, which is still on home time. It occurs when you travel quickly across two or more time zones.

Normal symptoms are fatigue, disturbed sleep, lack of concentration and even stomach disorders and are as intense as many time zones are crossed.

Even though there are many studies about it, Jet lag affects different people in different ways and either you can feel all of these as you can feel none of them. Age, state of health and stress levels are also relevant factors that can affect your jet lag symptoms.

Related – Budget Travel – How we traveled Asia for 10€/day !

Understanding Jet Lag

Our bodies are naturally programmed to do a list of things throughout our 24h day cycle such as waking up, eating and sleeping. These built-in biological routines are known as ‘circadian rhythms’ and traveling across time zones mess with them.

“Circadian” means “around-a-day” in Latin

In fact, according to “Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease Journal”, our body is better equipped to survive longer days than shorter days and, for that reason, jet lag symptoms are worst when you travel West, where the day gets bigger, than traveling East, where the day gets smaller. As it is normally said:  “West is the best, East is a beast”. It is exaggerated but we bet you won’t forget it anymore!

How to treat Jet Lag

Completely eliminating Jet Lag is probably impossible, especially if you are crossing multiple time zones. However, it is more than possible to reduce its effects with some strategies that we are happy to share with you:

• Relax your schedule or stimulate the new schedule before flying

Do you normally have a rigid schedule with your sleep and meals? Try to make it more flexible a few days before departing. If you are traveling East, go to bed earlier. If you are traveling West, do the opposite. You can also move your meals closer to the time you’ll be taking them at your destination.

• Maximize your sleep before flying

We fail hard on this one. We normally force sleeping just a few hours so we can sleep on the plane. It’s effective on that but it doesn’t help with the jet lag.

• Split your trip

If you make a stopover, you will give your body time to adapt, and your wallet will thank you! We know this isn’t always easy or possible but totally solves the problem.

• Set your watch to your destination’s time in the plane

This will help you get psychologically aligned with your destination’s schedule.

• Sleeping pills won’t help you

  It will help you sleep but won’t help you with jet lag.

• Goodbye to caffeine

Beverages such as coffee, cola, some teas and energy drinks will affect your ability to sleep and increase jet lag recovery time.

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• Consider NATURAL Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone in your body connected to the time of the day that plays an important role in sleep. Melatonin supplements are not proven to be safe but Pistachios are a natural alternative full of melatonin.

• Be active on the plane

Move around as much as you can and do some exercises to help you keeping the blood flowing.

• Arrive early

If you need to be at your best conditions for any kind of event, consider arriving a few days earlier to give your body time to adapt.

• Do Light Therapy

Sunlight helps regulating circadian rhythms. On Westward flights, get bright morning light at your new destination, and avoid afternoon and evening light exposure. On Eastward flights, avoid early light exposure in morning and get as much light as possible in the afternoon and early evening. Jet lag calculators like this one can help you.

• Take care of your sleep

High carb or fat diet can be disruptive to your sleep. A hot bath will relax your muscles and help you get your sleep.

Normally it is not needed further treatment for jet lag, but if these tips don’t help you consider visiting a sleep specialist.

We really hope this post helps you avoiding and deal with jet lag the next time you’ll be flying across time zones.

We just pretend to make travel a better experience for you, so you just travel more and more! Because traveling makes everything better!

With Love

Matilde & Miguel