How To Beat Jet Lag

Jet lag is the scourge of everyone who does long distance air travel.  The CDC says that the reason for jet lag is the fact that as a person crosses more than three time zones in a day their biological clock has a harder time adjusting to the new surroundings.  While the CDC article did say that eastward travel takes the longest to adjust to that has not been the experience of myself or those I have talked to about the issue.  This is because with long distance eastward travel you are able to go to sleep at 8:00 or 9:00pm local time where you arrive and sleep through to the next day and this helps automatically set your biological clock to the local time.  Now in order to do this I would recommend not sleeping on the plane during long distance eastbound travel so that you are sufficiently tired for the local nighttime where you land.  Unfortunately none of this applies when it comes to westward travel.  When you travel west, say from Tokyo to Houston, you will feel very tired by the time you get to the local night time but you will wake up in the middle of the night for no reason.  You will still be dead tired but will be unable to fall back asleep, with you just laying in the bed staring at the ceiling wishing you could go to sleep. 

The way to fix that problem is to take an antihistamine like BENADRYL® so that it puts you back to sleep and lets you complete the normal sleep cycle for your new time zone.

Now of course before taking this and or any other medication please consult your doctor to see if it is right for you, disclaimer, disclaimer. Now this is why I say if you can give yourself two days to recoup after doing long distance westward air travel.  This is because if you have to wake up at say 7:00am for work right after traveling west like that you might wake up at 3:30am on your own making it so if you took an antihistamine you would feel very groggy and dead tired when you had to wake up at 7:00am.  In the end the real trick to getting the body used to its newly found timezone is to immediately do things at the appropriate time for that timezone.  This includes eating, working out, sleeping and waking up.  If you eat everyday around 7:00pm in the United States then when you go to Tokyo or Germany eat at 7:00pm Japanese or German time.  Hope this helps, enjoy traveling.