Just mainline Five Hour Energy until you've satisfied the day's responsibilities and then sleep for 32 hours straight.

Can you sit outside in the sun? That helps. Just try to stay awake until it's dark. My sister travels frequently on overseas business and she says that works for her.

They say not to take a nap, I say bullshit. I always take a nap. I am tired, I have been in a flying cylinder, I have traveled through time and space. I can nap if I want to.

Just make sure it's not an eight-hour full sleep nap.

It's too late for this advice, but when I was a kid my parents were friends with this Australian woman who swore that the best thing to do was to spend the week before your flight getting as drunk as possible, and then to stop drinking when you arrived. Her theory was that your liver would be so grateful that it would respond by curing your jet lag.

I once had a professor walk into a class where he was giving a guest lecture talking about how jet lagged he was, at which point the professor in charge of the class went out to get him a large latte. Turns out he had flown from Seattle to San Diego. The day before.

So basically, use it to convince people to buy you stuff.

Take cheap flights that involve long layovers and getting up too early or staying up all night and travel for like two days so that by the time you reach your destination you no longer have a sense of what time it should be anyway. Easier to adjust when you've already lost all concept of time.

Well, from the twitter-stalking I did this morning it sounds like you have the right idea about just staying awake for as long as humanly possible until night-time... get out of your house and doing something active really helps.

I did NYC>Auckland>NYC recently; I landed in Auckland at 7am after abour 24 hours of travel and made sure to keep on my feet (zoo & museum) for as long as possible. Checked into my hotel at 4, tried to figure out my power converter to plug my phone in... but the jetlag had hit and I couldn't figure it out, so I - in order - cried, showered, took a strict two-hour nap/rest, then woke up, had dinner, then went back to bed a few hours later. That ended up being the better jet-lag experience of the trip, mostly because I had slept about 5 hours on the plane from LA to Auckland.

On the way home, though, I took 4 flights in 34 hours (I was at the bottom of the South Island so I had to get to Auckland first) and slept not one wink for all 34 of it. Landed JFK around 8pm (and looked like a deranged sleepwalker at baggage claim), was home by 9, and then caught a second wind so I unpacked and hung around on Tumblr until about 11pm... then slept until 11am the next morning.

So YMMV but seriously, go do something that keeps you walking around (but, like, maybe not hiking/running/something where you can injure yourself easily) for as long as possible, and if you have to nap, keep it short.

Freaking oath, Mallory, I don't know, I just sleep whenever the wizard closes my eyes, take melatonin at bedtime, and pray a lot. Going TO Australia isn't too troubling to my internal clock because I always arrive in the morning having gotten a catnap and a stiff neck on the plane, so my strategy is to keep moving and stay outside if at all possible until nightfall, by which point I'm vibrating with exhaustion and fall asleep like a fussy toddler, that is, mid-sob. But returning-home jetlag is a differently-tinted equine altogether.

Refuse to give in to this new time zone; live and sleep as if you are still abroad. Eventually your body will get sick of it and readjust.

My grandfather lives in CT but always has his watch set to California time, "the only time that matters."

There is nothing like the misery of International Date Line jetlag, where entire days disappear or stretch on forever like the sun will never set.

(My worst trip was when I had to cross the date line twice there & twice back).

Embrace it. Lots of hour long naps. Soon things will go back to normal and this time will be a foggy memory.

Become a cat. Have you ever met a cat with jet lag? Exactly.

My formula for US-Europe trips is (1) arrive mid-afternoon, (2) haul several huge suitcases up steep hills and also several flights of stairs (or some other form of vigorous exercise), (3) go for a long walk to find food, (4) eat something magnificent at an hour that a reasonable person would call dinner time, (5) let oblivion take you, (6) get up early and go for a run.

Bonus points: do this in Norway in the dead of winter or the middle of summer, when daylight provides no sensible cues for your body to follow ("What? It's 2PM? But it's... dark?").

I have done the Australia-U.S. route many, many times over the last 20 years (ooooofff that feels old to say, ye gods), and the jet lag is **so much worse** coming back to the U.S.

In my experience, the best results come from a combination of forcing yourself onto a schedule as soon as possible - I try to go back to work the day after I arrive, even if it's just for a few hours - and treating it like the world's worst hangover, with lots of soothing teas and healthy-feeling comfort foods like Thai noodle dishes.

I come down firmly in the no-nap camp, but I have no problem making bedtime 8:00 p.m. for as many nights in a row I need to. I also expect that I'll wake up in the wee hours for a few nights, so I try to plan a few things I can do in bed (podcasts, old-favourite shows, *light* reading) so I can still get some good rest time in and not roll around cursing the skies in sleepless rage.

That last is huge, actually: my wife and I just got back to the States last week, and she had the rage while I had the restful plans. My plans worked really well, as long as she was asleep or thought I was; the second she realised we were both awake at the same time, she was howling at me like a wounded coyote, and there was Officially No More Rest To Be Had.

Eat when your non-jet lagged self would normally eat. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor...

My mom still brings up the trip we took to London when I was 18 where I was so jetlagged I slept until TEN AM! And in consequence missed seeing not one but two nice churches with her!

I just sleep whenever and figure it will work out in the end. And it does! I am invariably back on a normal schedule within a week.

An English dude once told me that the best treatment for jet lag is Irish Coffee. I also hold the personal belief that the best thing to do before getting on a plane is to drink a giant blue margarita at one of those airport Chili's. Basically, what I'm saying is (if you are a drinking sort) booze it both ways.

The jet lag I'm most familiar with is North America to Europe "they dimmed the lights for two hours to make it seem like it was sleepy time and then they woke everyone up for breakfast but you only got two hours of sleep *if you're lucky*" jet lag. The best remedy for that is to go to a local grocery store and buy French prunes. Not only are they incredibly much more delicious than North American prunes, but they... come in handy for other reasons, too.

I feel your pain. Landing after a 24-hour (ish) flight from Adelaide to London (and we took off at about 10pm so we had been awake all day beforehand, in the presence of a three-year-old on his birthday. We did not get to nap, is my point) I was just so tired that I was angry. My boyfriend had to say to me at one point, "I'm not making you stay awake because I'm being mean!".

(We went to bed at about 8 and forcing myself to stay up until then was awful.)

I... don't handle jet lag. It's gotten slightly better since I discovered that a couple of Benadryl and an Ativan will likely knock me out for a few hours on the plane. But still, after every single long-haul flight I tell myself I'm going to stay up until local nightfall this time! and then I never do. It's especially bad when I fly to Zurich to see my parents because the flight leaves at 5 PM, too early in the day for me to sleep on the plane even with chemical assistance, and arrives at 6 AM, much too early in the day for me to be able to stay up until my normal bedtime.

On the first day of our honeymoon I (inexplicably, in hindsight) decided to soak my feet before setting out to go sightseeing. "I don't want to waste any time in Barcelona napping,"" I said to my husband, filled with contempt for these nappers and their weakness. I promptly passed out and woke up 6 hours later, incredibly confused as to why my upper body was on the bed while my feet were in a bucket of cold water.

You got me, I'm still all fucked up from losing an hour on Sunday.

Break your foot and lose a parent while you're traveling. I had absolutely no jet lag when I flew back to the US from NZ under those conditions!

I never really got jet lag until I turned 30 (yay?), but I have found the combination of exercise, exposure to sunlight, and alternating coffee and Ambien until my body adjusts is helpful. I'm really curious what helps with the mental soup that accompanies jet lag, though.

After a recent Canada - Australia - Canada trip, the first night home was spent pacifying my cat and the second night and third nights were spent sleeping like a log for four hours until 1 am then crankily marathoning GBBO until I gave up and rose to face the day. The fourth night, I remembered the sleeping pills someone had given me for the flight and it was glorious.

Moral of the story: cats are vengeful, pharmaceuticals are your friend.

I have a theory that if you don't spend longer than three days in the new timezone, you don't get jet-lagged (you might be tired, though). It's once your body has adjusted to the new time that the jet-lag kicks in on flying back. I base this on doing a UK-Vietnam round trip via Thailand over four days, and commuting to Mexico from the UK for three weeks (fly out Monday, fly back Thursday night).

My strategy is to stay awake as long as possible once you've arrived, and not to nap. Go to bed at a reasonable time for the time zone you're in; don't expect to have a full night's sleep.

In college, I flew nonstop from San Francisco to London for a study abroad semester. I tried to take everyone's advice about staying awake during the day, etc., and ended up falling asleep on a park bench for three hours.

Several years later, I flew from Portland to Paris for my honeymoon and fell asleep, standing, at the Louvre. My brand-new spouse had to catch me.

I have no advice, but much sympathy.

Sleep science says:
1) get daylight in the morning. Go outside and stare up at the sky. It's crucial! Blue light in the morning is SO IMPORTANT for setting the circadian rhythm. It has to be in the mornings, just going outside in the afternoon is not enough.
2) shift your sleep schedule forwards, not backwards. If you have the choice, choose to stay awake for a longer time to go to bed on time, rather than trying to go to bed after a very short time up. Incidentally, this is the only way to make shift work not be completely intolerable. (I have sometimes been up an entire night and then gone to bed at 8 or 9 PM the next night - it's brutal, but it works when nothing else does...)

Source: my sleep scientist professors who lecture me about psychology until my brain melts