In its simplest form jet lag occurs whenever you travel and the time recorded by your body’s internal clock is out of balance with the local time at your destination. For instance, if you depart from London, England, at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok, Thailand, you will arrive about 13 hours later at 10 am London time the next morning. But, because you have flown across a number of time zones, local time at Bangkok international airport is now 4 pm on the day following your departure from London.

Having traveled to your hotel, checked in and taken a shower your body will now tell you that it is time to have something to eat. Now, your body clock thinks that it is time for lunch and, although everybody else is eating dinner, it doesn’t matter to your body clock what you call the meal, it is only interested in the fact that it is time to eat. So far so good, however, a couple of hours later when everybody begins going to bed your problems will start because your body clock believes it is now only late afternoon.

A time variation of 6 hours, such as that shown in this illustration, is significant and even the best of us will be experiencing jet lag. Actually, while a couple of hours will hardly be noticeable, anything over about 4 hours will produce jet lag symptoms in most of us.

There are of course several things that you can do prior to your journey, during your flight and after your arrival at your destination to help to reduce jet lag but one difficulty which researchers have found recently is that whenever your body clock experiences a significant shift in time it generally overcompensates when adjusting itself and thus leaves you suffering a double dose of jet lag before it eventually settles down. Against this background, how do you counteract this?

To a certain extent you can take this into account and lower your symptoms of jet lag by beginning to adjust your internal clock in advance of travel, although circumstances could make this hard. An alternative course of action therefore is simply to break your journey if you are going to be traveling across more than four or five time zones.

For our illustrative trip to Bangkok this might for example involve breaking your journey half way and resting for a day or two before flying on. Today’s air travel might have made the world smaller but I’m afraid that it is going to take the human body a bit longer to catch up to modern technology.

Tags:   body clock · cure · insomnia · jet lag · jetlag · remedy · synchronization · time zones · travel · treatment