How to Beat Jet Lag: Top Tips from Experts

Resetting your watch when you travel is easy. Resetting your brain is a lot more difficult, which is why Jet Lag challenges even the savviest of travelers. When you travel by plane, you change the time of day without resetting your body's clock. Suddenly, it's 5pm outside but your body insists it's 11pm and time to go to bed. The dissonance between external events and your internal clock can make you dizzy, weak and ill: that's jet lag.

"It's not because you've been on a plane for that long," said Dr. Russell Rosenberg, CEO of NeuroTrials Research and the Atlanta School of Sleep Medicine. "It's because you're trying to sync up with environmental time when your own internal core time can't move that fast."

Jet lag will pass after a few days, once you fall into sync with your destination. Fortunately, there are strategies that can speed up your acclimation to a new time zone, and a few have been scientifically studied and proven to be effective.

If you're taking a very short trip -- just for a meeting, or for a weekend vacation break -- you may not want to deal with the hassle of jet lag at all. Just schedule your activities for the times you'd normally be awake, and stay on "home time."

Jet Lag Symptoms

Jet lag affects your whole body; it's a physical syndrome. Symptoms include stomach upset, deep fatigue, fuzzy-headedness, absentmindedness, slow-wittedness, poor concentration, weakness, disrupted bowel movements, and changes in the frequency of urination.

Let's say you fly out of New York just after lunch at 3pm. When it would have been time for your dinner at 7 o'clock, your stomach is going to release enzymes and stomach acids in anticipation of food, but when you touch down in San Francisco, it's only going to be 4pm -- too late for lunch, too early for supper. Three hours later, when you would have been curling up with a book for the evening and your bodily functions would have started shutting down in anticipation of sleep, you`ll be nodding off in your gazpacho as your California business associates are plying their wits and picking at their martini olives.

Jet lag usually takes three to four days to overcome naturally, Rosenberg said. It's worst if you're flying east because the human body cycle is actually slightly longer than 24 hours, which makes it hard to shift your body clock earlier. When you travel west, you're required to stay up late, which is more acceptable to your body than going to bed early. If you're traveling from east to west, your recovery will usually take 30% to 50% less time.

Most night-owl types tend to adapt faster to the new time zone on a trip out west. When traveling east, on the other hand, night owls tend to adjust far more slowly, and it's the early birds who get the worm. Likewise, "morning people" are more readily able to rise and shine at any hour, even if it means cutting short the sleep period for a few hours each day.

Age is also a factor in your ability to cope with jet lag. While even infants experience jet lag, they recover very quickly. "Kids in general, with circadian rhythms, do tend to have a more flexible clock," Rosenberg said. It becomes harder to adjust to rapid time zone shifts as you grow older, he said.

As you might guess, healthy people cope better with jet lag than people in poor health, whose body rhythms have already been disrupted. Jet lag will make you feel even worse if you travel while ill. If you must take prescription drugs during your trip, be aware that jet lag may impair their effectiveness.

Several other personality factors figure into your capacity to cope with east-west travel. Gregarious types, who love to meet new people, mix among various social groups, and travel in a pack, tend to cope better with jet lag than people who reach a destination and retreat to their rooms with a book or remote control. This is because the more you expose yourself to external stimuli in your new environment, the faster the necessary chemical changes will take place in your brain to help you adapt to your new surroundings.

How to Prepare for Jet Lag

Sleep doctors have two major approaches for speeding up adaptation to jet lag. You can mitigate the symptoms with drugs, and you can actually change your body clock with light therapy.

Also, for years, Argonne National Laboratories in Illinois has been offering a special diet which has plenty of anecdotal, although little scientific, backing for success. You can find Argonne's diet online at www.antijetlagdiet.com.

For brief trips, you can curtail the symptoms of jet lag without having to take any drugs or follow any complicated diet regimens. Try the following tricks the next time you fly.

• Start resetting your body clock before you fly. Shift your bedtime by an hour or two in the right direction starting three days before your trip.
• Drink lots of water before, during, and after your flight. Experts recommend that you drink at least two 8-ounce glasses just before departure and 1 liter for every hour you spend in the air -- in addition to beverages you drink with meals. Even if you don't feel thirsty, drink up. Thirst doesn't necessarily precede the symptoms of dehydration, which can set in without warning.
• The minute you step into the airplane cabin, adopt the hour of the time zone you're traveling to. Reset your watch and start to think according to the new time zone.
• Avoid drinking alcohol or ingesting other depressants, such as Dramamine or other motion-sickness drugs, before, and during your flight.
• Eat more lightly than you are accustomed to before your flight and while you're in the air.
• Daytime naps are OK to take after you arrive, but keep them to 30 minutes or less so they don't interfere with your nighttime sleep.