Coping With The Symptoms Of Jet Lag By Breaking Up Your Journey

In its simplest form jet lag occurs when you travel and you internal body clock’s time 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 land roughly 13 hours later at 10 am London time the next morning. However, because you have traveled across a number of time zones, the local time at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport is now 4 pm that same afternoon.

Having traveled to your hotel, checked in and taken a shower your internal bod clock will now be telling you that it is time to have something to eat. Now, your body thinks that it is time for lunch and, although everyone else is eating dinner, it doesn’t matter to your body clock what you call the meal, it only cares that you eat. So far so good, however, three or four hours later when everyone else begins going to bed your problems will begin as your body clock believes it is now only late afternoon.

A time difference of 6 hours, such as that shown in this illustration, is significant and most people would experience the effects of jet lag. Actually, while a couple of hours will hardly produce any effect at all, anything over 4 hours will produce jet lag symptoms in most of us.

There are of course various things which you can do prior to your journey, during the course of your flight and at your destination to help to counter jet lag but one problem that researchers have noted recently is that whenever your internal body clock experiences a large shift in time it frequently overcompensates when adjusting itself and thus leaves you suffering from a double dose of jet lag before it finally settles down. Against this background, how can you compensate for this?

To a certain extent you can take this into account and lower your jet lag symptoms by beginning to adjust your internal clock before travelling, although your personal circumstances could make this difficult. One alternative course of action therefore is simply to break your journey whenever you are traveling across more than 4 or 5 time zones.

In the case of our illustrative trip to Thailand this could for example involve breaking your journey half way and resting for a day before flying on. Today’s air travel might have made the world smaller but it is going to take the human body a bit longer to catch up to modern technology.