There are many prevention systems and cures out there for jet lag, but can any of them really help when you go on a long trip across time zones? If there were some miraculous cure, everyone would have heard of it by now, but for ways to lessen the impact we first have to understand just why we get jet lag in the first place.
Jet lag is caused when we cross time zones and the light to dark cycle of the earth is changed in relation to us. That is, when we go eastwards, from the perspective of our bodies, we shorten the day and night time comes sooner than our bodies expect, and when we travel westward, the day gets effectively longer and night time comes later. This is what messes with our own internal body clock, a cluster of cells located in the brain that respond to the light/dark cycle of the world around us. It works on a twenty-four-hour cycle and expects light and dark to occur at roughly the same frequency each day.
Quick changes, such as travelling across multiple time zones, confuse it, and the body clock does not know whether we should be asleep or awake. The result is that we just feel awful, as everyone who has travelled at all knows only too well. The only way to stop that jet lag feeling is to rebalance the body clock with the current time zone, the quicker it is in step with the actual day/night cycle, the faster we feel better. With this in mind, it is probably easy to see how effective most of the cures and aids would be if used, but there are things that can be done to help.
One of the worst things with jet lag is if it is a short business trip, you have often arrived and done the meeting before you can really adjust, and there is nothing worse than a serious business meeting when suffering from jet lag. In a situation like this, adjusting your sleep patterns over the week before you take the trip can make a real difference for that important meeting. If, for instance, you were flying east, you would start going to sleep earlier and get up earlier in the days before the flight. If traveling west, then the opposite, later to sleep, later to rise in the morning. It is not a perfect solution by any means, but it can be enough to get you through a trip.
Jet lag is simply a consequence of modern, fast, transcontinental travel, and is something that we have to accept as part of the experience. However, for us here at Regency Transportation, we would like to think that this advice may help to lessen the effects to all of those travelling around the world.
