And please don’t tell me “just stay awake while the sun is out.” A wizard has taken up residence behind my eyes and I have no control when he opens and closes them. I live inside of a jar of malicious jelly. There is molasses and cobwebs in my brain. Sleep is a vicious Paleozoic sea that washes over me against my will. Yesterday was Monday, and today is Monday as well? I don’t remember when the last time I was fully awake. Give me your advice, and I will take it, if I have not lost the power of speech.
Just mainline Five Hour Energy until you’ve satisfied the day’s responsibilities and then sleep for 32 hours straight.
This is dangerous dangerous advice if you are a certain type of person (ask me how I know), as it may lead to sitting at your desk bouncing in your chair and refreshing the hyphen toast dot net all day, fully convinced in the only operational corner of your brain that this actually fulfills the day’s responsibilities.
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.
THIS SOUNDS GOOD TO ME
Sitting outside in the sun is the best thing you can do. It resets the body and you feel less sludgy.
Some napping is ok, as long as you don’t nap too close to the time you should be going to bed in the new time zone. And I always sort of enjoy the jetlag as much as I can, especially the early-morning-wakeful part of it. It’s an excuse to look at the sunrise as it’s happening, or just to feel how strange the world is, as one is temporarily not in tune with it.
^^this! granted I was not old enough to have money-earning responsibilities when I was terribly jet-lagged, but my favorite memories of it are:
-being pinged awake at 3 am, & sitting on my bed, playing cards with my brother until we cheerily waved goodbye to my Dad, as he left for work at 6.
-actually passing out while watching Big on the couch. I remember seeing Tom Hanks jump around on the FAO Schwartz piano, & my next memory is looking at the ceiling, realizing I’m lying back on the couch, then sitting up, & seeing the credits roll on the TV.
the sun stuff sounds like good advice, short of taking melanin.
Ok I did this once and ended up sleeping for 2+ hours in a French park and getting very sunburned in the face so… your mileage may very.
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.
Yep. After long-haul flights I shower, crash for two to four hours, engage in whatever needs to be engaged in (hopefully including dinner with someone entertaining enough to keep my mind off of the fact that I want nothing more than to pass out in my pasta), and sleep like the dead on night one.
That being said, it only ever works going over. It hardly ever works coming home, and I (usually) feel like a zombie for a week.
What IS that, man? Why is jetlag so much worse going home??
idk, but I think it is actively linked to “home” – i had a German boss in NA who claimed that the jetlag going to Germany was the _worst_ while coming back to Canada was easy peasy.
I’ve always heard going east is harder than going west, which makes sense to me… it’s like springing forward for daylight savings multiplied by the number of time zones you cross.
Yes! I can deal much, much better with lost time than the Neverending Day.
Because vacation is over and you have to do laundry.
Yep. I have no regrets about getting to Paris on my honeymoon and settling in for a midday nap. Spouse explored for a few hours on his own, and when I woke up I was ready to go get dinner and enjoy the evening. Worth it!
We napped so much on our honeymoon. It was glorious.
Hour-long naps are key. I used to have jam-packed weeks before and after travel, and those naps saved me.
Once, I met up with my family on a sheep farm in Yorkshire; they were adjusted, I wasn’t. I blearily stumbled through the 7am B&B breakfast. We were planning a busy day involving two long hikes. I said I could do it, all I needed was a quiet hour to nap.
25 min into my nap, my mother excitedly bounces into my room, “The sheep are here! Come look at the sheep with me!!”
Mothers.
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.
that’s the most ridiculous and beautiful and Australian thing I’ve ever heard
I don’t know if her theory is right, but she sounds like a lot of fun.
That is the most irresponsible, ridiculous advice ever and I love it.
That is the most Australian advice ever and I love it.
Oh, that’s excellent! My (Scottish) husband’s corollary: if you feel like you’re coming down with a cold, get drunk. His theory is that the body can’t handle both a cold and a hangover at the same time, so will allow only one to happen. So: you either avoid a cold and deal with a hangover; or get sick, but get a consequences-free alcohol binge out of it.
I’ve always felt that by drinking a lot, you make the body inhospitable, and the germs decide to mosey on along to better real estate.
I mean really you’re just sterilizing your insides.
I can say with one hundred percent certainty that this is not true. I can say with one hundred and ten percent certainty that a combination hangover and sinus infection is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’ve been hit by a car and had to get my stomach pumped (separate occasions, to be clear).
Peak Aussie right there, it takes so long for us to get anywhere that really, drinking is the only to cope.
Accept that you are only half a sentient being until the soul your jet-borne meatsack outstripped catches up with you. Avoid driving or handling precious objects.
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.
I have a friend who used to claim to be jet lagged for weeks. Once in college we were hanging out on a weekend and she went “Sorry I’m so tired guys, it’s the jet lag”. And then I pointed out that it had been on a month since she’d been on a plane and she realized that maybe she was just tired.
I think it actually takes three to four weeks to fully reset, though, so maybe she was more sensitive than you? Anecdotally, I can tell you that I feel the change of daylight savings time for three weeks. Not kidding.
Seattle to San Diego? Oh wow, that professor wasted perfectly good coffee money on that dude.
Aren’t Seattle and San Diego in the same time zone?
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.
Or maybe I just do that because I’m cheap.
This is also my strategy… fighting tiredness with tiredness?
This 100% worked for me coming back from Edinburgh. We did Edinburgh-London-Dallas (which had a 2-hour delay)-El Paso. I had been awake for almost 24 hours at that point and by the time we got home it was bedtime so I took a melatonin just in case and just completely crashed. I was a little sleepy the next day, but mostly because I’m over 30 so I’m pretty much always a little sleepy.
Buy a 30 hour flight with two layovers. Don’t sleep for 24 hours before the flight, spend 14 hours between two rows of angry babies, nap on the floor of Singapore airport, then take a sleeping pill on the plane so that you fall into a mild coma and only wake up when German cleaning staff are threatening to take your hand luggage away. Land in England at 7 in the morning with your brain still hanging around Papua New Guinea. Be completely fucked for three or four days but then kind of fine. If anyone asks about your journey give them a hollow look and whisper ‘babiiieeees’.
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.
I did Detroit to Dunedin via Auckland years ago. When I got to the south island, I begged for a nap. When my husband woke me after an hour, I started to cry.
Coming back eastward was way easier, for some reason.
Going from NY to NZ wasn’t bad at all (zero jet lag!) but coming back was AWFUL. It’s always harder for me coming back east and I normally plan when I should sleep so my jet lag isn’t too bad but I got all confused with the time zones and the layovers. It was bad. I think arriving at night was a good idea- I got home around 10am and couldn’t stop napping.
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.
Seconding melatonin at bedtime!
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.”
I love your Grandfather. I have lived out of CA for like 15 years and still have a watch set to CA time!
“I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona!”
Having lived for two years in LA County, with attendant cost of living and traffic woes, then moved back to my beloved Tucson, I can honestly say . . . “Strike that. Reverse it.”
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.
what trip is this that involves crossing the date line twice each way? please explain for inquiring minds!
Oh! Flying from North America to Cook Islands via New Zealand.
that sounds fantastic! hopefully you managed it with a copy of captain cook’s logs to browse through as light reading material! (i have never read them directly, but have read analyses of them in books like margaret cohen’s The Novel and the Sea, and they seem fascinating!)
I should have! It would have reminded me that there are far worse ways to travel (although, Captain Cook & his crew didn’t have to deal with jet leg)
I read this as “captain’s logs” as in Star Trek, and the inherent confusion of going back and forth through the calendar.
“Captain’s log, supplemental. It is now Thursday when yesterday it was Friday. We obviously need to make contact with Q.”
Become a cat. Have you ever met a cat with jet lag? Exactly.
Actually, when I moved my cat from the East Coast to the West Coast, I think she did have some jetlag. She was used to getting fed at 7am EST and for the first few weeks home kept waking me up at 4am PT
My cat has definitely not adjusted to the DST change yet. I usually wake up to her staring at me and making “mrrrr” noises at 6:10am, but for the past few days it has been 7:10am.
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?”).
You had me until “go for a run.”
(and I say this as someone who is an avid runner)
Weeeeelllll I’m not an avid runner, so for me it’s more of a “stagger and wheeze resentfully.” But it works! Or at least makes me miserable about something other than jet lag.
Yeah! Go for a run and boggle at all the unfamiliar street signs, become familiar with the smell of the air in the new place, get a little lost, enjoy the sights, and frighten the bork out of the pedestrians. Then tell your traveling partner(s) about all of the interesting things you noticed and what places you want to explore more!
Last summer I went to the US for the first time, which was awesome, but flying back to Europe absolutely wrecked me for days. As far as I can tell there is no antidote against the evil sorcery of flying eastwards-jet lag :-/
Drink lots of fluids and stay outside and do stuff if the season permits it.
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.
“treating it like the world’s worst hangover” YES.
I just want to agree with you that going east to west has been much easier (for me) than going west to east. No idea why. Maybe because I just get up ridiculously early in the morning for a day or two? Regardless, I would choose a 6-hour time difference east-west than a 3-hour difference west-east. Ugh, bodies.
Funny, for me it’s about the same either way. I dislike the home trip to Australia because of losing the day I gain going to the US.
Eat when your non-jet lagged self would normally eat. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor…
I’ve also heard that it helps if you fast for at least 8 hours before your flight (as well as during the flight itself, but really, is that a sacrifice, given airplane food?), so your meal clock can reset itself to your new time schedule more easily.
Yes, this is definitely the best thing that I do to not get jet lag. I know this is a bit of inviting the response “Congratulations, how wonderful for you” but I started doing the below in 2013 and now have not had jet lag since 2012:
http://harpers.org/blog/2012/03/the-empty-stomach…
Admittedly I’ve never done anything over the date line which I understand to be utterly brutal but this works a treat for the 5h and 8h time differences I most usually deal with.
Ooof, I’ve heard this works wonders for people but I simply would not be able to do it. I suffer from bad motion sickness, and if I fly on an empty stomach or if I eat too soon before flying, I will be vomiting or dry heaving the entire flight even if I take my usual antiemetic pill. I have had to learn this the hard way, and now avoid taking early morning flights because of this :'(
This is exactly what I thought! Planes don’t agree with me at the best of times, trying to do it on an empty stomach is a recipe for a migraine and horrible nausea for me.
I have noticed that I get more airsick with an empty stomach. What is up with that? Is the stomach bored and needs something to do? Does eating distract it? So many questions.
THIS. It definitely helps. I think it probably helps more if you start before you get on the plane, but it should help if you do it when you land, too?
As it happens, the Beeb website has something to say about that this morning: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160314-how-airl…
oh. wrong beeb. i was ready for justin bieber weighing in on jet lag.
I have no advice, just an amusing anecdote: one time my husband was so jet-lagged that when we came back to our hotel room, he fell face-down on the bed, mumbled, “I can’t figure out how these covers work,” and promptly conked out for four hours. Shoes still on and everything.
I guess if you can still operate bedclothes you’re good?
Try to eat 3 meals at normal times. So breakfast at a reasonable hour, Lunch around noonish, Dinner around 6. Then get to sleep at like 7:30 -8
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.
I like this. Don’t fight it. it will probably take as long as it takes to get better, whether you work hard to “fix” it or not.
And really, Mallory, who are you to fight a wizard who lives in eyeballs?
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.
UUUGHH before an evening flight to Germany I once had three before-airport cocktails and then drank what amounted to a full bottle of red wine at a fucking Vino Volo before boarding. I was shitfaced going through security, and then once I got on the plane, I popped a sleeping pill. Woke up before we were about to land , simultaneously hung over and jetlagged. My first introduction to Deutschland was vomiting in the Munich airport. DO NOT RECOMMEND
Okay, so, maybe don’t take it that far…oof.
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.
WHY why why the airplane flying and the lack of effort on the part of my colon? Some would say dehydration but I make it my business to drink loads of water when I fly. And yet.
It comforts me that I’m not the only one who suffers so.
Why why why do they do that? Why spend 3-4 hours serving meals with barely any sleeping time on an overnight flight? One meal would be enough!
1. If you’re awake, being fed breaks up the boredom.
2. Hungry passengers are hangry passengers.
Oh, the waking up for breakfast!!!!
“You vill haf a donut.”
I don’t want donut, I want sleeping.
“You VILL HAF a donut.”
Yes ma’am, I will haf a donut.
I actually eat and enjoy all the food, and I watch all the movies. I can’t sleep on a plane, so I would just be glaring HATEFULLY at everyone else. Though it does seem very cruel for them to wake up sleeping passengers. (Also, I always get an aisle seat so I can walk around and go to the bathroom as much as I want without disturbing the sleepies. Not because I’m nice, but because niceness would curb my desire to get up and walk around all the time and increase my hateful resentment of sleepies.)
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 did something similar when I moved to Denmark a few years ago. I was Skyping with my then-boyfriend and at 7:45 he kept telling me to give up and go to bed.
“NO! I have to stay awake or I won’t get on schedule! 7:45 is TOO EARLY.”
“It’s 15 minutes.”
“NO!”
Jet lag, restoring full-grown adults to toddlerdom one flight at a time.
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.
my upper body was on the bed while my feet were in a bucket of cold water
this is a HILARIOUS image
I initially missed that the OP had done that on purpose, and thought her new husband, in a fit of puckish spousal mischief, had decided to add a little weirdness and schadenfreude to her wake-up. This seemed entirely reasonable. Ah, l’amour!
Look, alls I’m saying is that any dude who gets to the honeymoon stage with me and doesn’t take every opportunity to make my life a little stranger is clearly not the dude for me.
Everything about your post pleases me enormously.
I got back from Spain two days ago. On the way there, I slept with the aid of Tylenol PM and awoke to find myself ready for lunch. On the way back, I was awake for 24 hours of straight travel, topped with two margaritas at O’Hare before getting home at midnight and collapsing in a heap. My sleep is normal but I’m suffering from lack of rioja.
Um, I think no one told Mallory this yet, but: Mallory. Brace yourself. It is Tuesday. You will be OK.
You got me, I’m still all fucked up from losing an hour on Sunday.
So bad this year for some reason (probably because like a genius I made an early morning appointment for the Monday immediately after the clocks changed. Huge mistake.)
I came home from work and immediately started to cry from exhaustion.
Last fall I had a business trip from EST to MST the Monday after time change. Other than going to bed at 8pm MST the first night, I had no jet lag problems, but I was SO CONFUSED about the actual time. No one had updated the clock in my hotel room and I couldn’t figure it out, some of the clocks in the office had been updated but some had not, I was mistrustful of my phone clock, when I logged in remotely to my desktop it was on EST… I was so wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey.
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.
Oh no, you poor thing, that’s horrible! Grief and pain throw the whole world into even more disorder than jet lag does.
I just flew from Seattle to the east coast Saturday–>Sunday and between the jet lag and DST I’m wrecked. So far I’m subsisting by not talking to many people and letting my eyes unfocus as often as they like, which is most of the time. And also caffeine.
I have two strategies:
Strategy the first: Stay awake until sometime between 8 and 10 PM. This is most useful the day of your arrival, and if you can swing it, will significantly reduce the amount of jet lag.
Strategy the second: Say “Screw it!” and give in. Nap when your body wants to nap, wake up and read when your body wants to wake up. Eventually it’ll get sorted out. Just enjoy being a creature in tune with their desires for a while instead of one bogged down by routine.
It’s too late for you, but prevention is the best cure! The SECOND you step in the airport give yourself a time piece set to the time at your destination. You have to manipulate yourself into believing that this is the TRUE time and that ALL other clocks are lying to you, EVEN AND ESPECIALLY when you have to use the LYING TIME for stuff like catching your plane. You will be served breakfasts for dinner and chicken parmesan for breakfast and you will know that this is them trying to trick you.
MOST IMPORTANTLY you have to KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT for at least 2 hours at a time when you might be sleeping at your target destination. If you can’t sleep on the plane, whatever, just keep ’em shut.
By the time you get where you’re going, you’ll be pissed off at everyone for thrusting a time conspiracy at you, and you’ll be tired and confused, but you’ll step off that plane knowing what time it is.
I’d say it’s time to schedule some phone calls or coffees with friends to fill the daylight hours. We’re talking your best ‘get a grip’ friends, the ones who won’t take it personally that you’re falling asleep in said coffee and will instead shake you awake, bodily.
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.
Marathoning GBBO while narrating it on my imaginary podcast “Overprooved” is one of my favourite insomnia activities!
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.
This is true! Three days of weird time means you’ll be tired from lack of sleep, but your circadian rhythm hasn’t had time to adapt yet. It stays in your home time zone, making everything easier for you when you get back home. I learned this from a scientist who studies shift work. Three days is the max anyone should spend on any shift, precisely because the body starts to adjust afterwards (which makes the NEXT shift schedule intolerable – it’s better to stay on day shift time and be tired than to actually shift your entire body clock several times a month).
I fly internationally a lot, often for work (which is the worst because you’re often stuck inside for meetings). Melatonin or valium at night. Black out curtains or sleep mask at night. Hearty breakfast in morning. If you have the option to get outside in the morning take it. Next best is to open curtains at dawn, even if you go back to bed. Good luck!
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.
Oh God, a similar thing happened to me on my first trip to Japan. I arrived around noon and the check-in time at the hotel I was staying at was in the evening, so I decided to dump my luggage into a coin locker at the train station and check out one of the local museums. At that point I had been awake for nearly 30 hours straight. I almost ended up fainting in the middle of an exhibition on samurai swords.
I did trips to Australia almost three years straight because my husband lived there. The jetlag coming back to Chicago was fucking MURDEROUS. For my last trip, I used an entire week to recover. I followed no specific plan except to just…sleep. I slept until I felt like myself again.
I fly back and forth from Japan pretty frequently these days. My trick is to drink lots of gin (and also bottled water, because hydration is important for your skin in all that awful plane air) on the flight and get drunk enough to lose track of time.
Taking care of my skin also helps the adjustment because if I can reduce surrounding “eww I feel gross” jet lag won’t hit me as hard. I wear minimal make-up the day I fly, or just moisturizer. When I get on the plane I use a makeup wipe to take off any I have on. I reapply moisturizer to my face and hands every couple hours and sometimes use those tiny Evian purse sprays in between. If I need makeup at the destination I’ll apply right before landing.
What worked best for me, back when I was flying back and forth to Korea, was to get good and drunk, and once your hangover goes away, the jet lag is pretty well handled. Of course, I was in my early 20s at the time, so your mileage may vary.
Whenever I get back from Asia I just fall asleep in random places. Usually at parties, alone and fully clothed in some corner of the house. Once like 10 people were watching SVU and I was in a corner of the couch with a cat asleep on top of me, and my friend had draped a blanket from her bed on top.
That being said, ZZQUIL ALL HAIL. I take it there and back on really bad flights. Just forcing yourself to miserably get through the first week seems to do it for me. I tried to wait until at least 9pm to fall asleep.
My Top 3 Tips to Handle Jet Lag :
Pray to R’hllor every hour
Remember your Bene Gesserit training
Ask yourself if Ayn Rand would have let herself fall asleep like some lazy moocher
I am still dealing with jetlag a week later (U.S. to U.K.) but I might just be lazy and a bad person. Trying to stay awake until you can go to bed at ‘normal’ times for the time zone you’re in, is the route I try (and consistently fail) to take, but only superhuman people manage it for the most part.
SO, if you are mortal: coffee and long showers, for times you are supposed to get up but want to go back to sleep. TV shows that make you angry but keep you interested, and activities like leaving your house/bed for long periods of time, for staying awake. When you are meant to go to bed but have the energy of a small child, remove your cell phone/tablet/any device that could entertain you from your bedroom, and get under the covers. Imagine that in a few short hours, someone will want you to be awake and they will not let you sleep. Foster this sense of dread until an anxiety attacks seems imminent, and then relish your current ability to sleep/rest undisturbed.
*All above advice given by person still jetlagged, 7 full days after travel. Take with small sack of salt.
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
This is very helpful! I’m going from the east coast to China next week, so I have a 12 hour time difference, which basically gives me no cues as to which way to adjust. Staying awake longer sounds kind of horrible, but at least it’s an answer.
The important thing is to realise that the body has TWO ways to tell us when to sleep, and we can use both to our advantage. One is circadian rhythm, and the other is homeostatic pressure (the need to sleep, based on how rested you are). Those two are different! So, use them both. Get morning light to reset your circadian rhythm, and stay up for a long time to build up sleep pressure. The combined effect will eventually help you sleep at the right time.
My experience flying to China was far better than flying to Germany because of the 12-hour difference. It felt essentially like an all-nighter, even with the extra 12 hours in there; I’ve felt worse after insomniac, non-travelling nights than I did the day after landing in China.
(p.s. take a bunch of little packs of Kleenex with you, or buy some the very second you get there. Toilet paper is…not always present, even in restaurants/offices.)
I bought some already but I’m worried it won’t be enough. I use…a lot…of toilet paper on a regular basis.
If you pull the cardboard tube out of the center of a normal roll (which is easier to do than it sounds, may require minor tearing) you can flatten the whole thing to fit in a quart ziploc. Much more convenient for carrying around.
Small tissue packets are widely available for sale in China, thanks to how people use them for TP and napkins! If you look in anywhere like a grocery or convenience store you should be able to find them.
I’m going to Vietnam in June and am Very Worried about this.
My sleep clock is pretty easy to course-correct, but what I really struggle with is my meal schedule getting thrown off. I’ll wake up in the night, because I’m expecting a meal, and then I’ll feel sort of ill in the morning when I’m supposed to eat and don’t want to.
Disastrously. Just do what you can and in a week it’ll work itself out. The less caffeine you drink, the shorter amount of time you’ll need to stop feeling like Taco Bell diarrhea.
I traveled to CA-UK twice a month for 6 months and when I *really* needed to be awake, I would do shoulder stand or legs up the wall for a few minutes and that would buy me an hour of relatively normal cognitive functioning.
I’ve found that what works best is just be vaguely cross about it, and settle in to living in a new realm, vis a vis your own personal schedule. You used to sleep until 10? That person is gone. Now you get up at 5:15! It’s like emerging form a chrysalis – you are different than you were before, and that’s that.
I can’t help you. For most of my trip to Japan and about 10 days afterwards I felt like I was on a vision quest due to my sleep deprivation. I saw no visions but felt like I was borderline delusional a lot of the time. One day I even fell asleep at my desk at work.
Accept that you will never sleep the same way again. Three hour naps and the belief that 2 AM is going to bed early are your new normal. Embrace it.
I don’t know what it’s like flying to the us, but for down under to europe there is no cure. Let the wizard take you in his grey fuzzy embrace, do what he demands, he will abate eventually.
Tap into your divine inner sleep warrior. It is absolutely possible to sleep 8 hours during the day, eat a light dinner, and sleep 8 hours again.
Alternatively, there’s that fasting thing the CIA and Mormon Tabernacle Choir do, but it’s too late for such measures.
Try to adjust when you eat. Don’t starve yourself or anything, but try to eat breakfast around the time you want to get up in the morning instead of after your unholy jetlag naps. You’re basically tricking your brain by telling it “hey this is when food things happen, so you need to be awake for that.”
I play a lot of Civilization when I get to my destination. That way I stay up until it feels like a reasonable hour to go to bed. (But usually I travel abroad between my home & my parents’ home, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything if I hide inside for a day.)
I don’t really know how to deal with jet lag, but I know how NOT to deal with it from a school trip to France. We arrived mid-morning after 20 hours in the air. We went to the hotel where I THOUGHT we would get a chance for a quick nap before doing whatever we were going to do that afternoon — but NO! The teachers in charge made us walk all over Paris for hours and hours on end. Naturally I was incredibly ill the next day, and one of the teachers had the nerve to say she had no idea why — it’s because I went 36 hours with no sleep!!!
I guess I’m still mad about that, huh. Anyway, accept that your brain will fail to function for several days. There’s not much to do about it.
Exercise – outdoors preferably! It will help re-regulate your sleep.
I’m an American living over in Sydney and studied abroad in Wellington years ago. I travel a bit to the US for work and have made the journey 3 times in the past 8 months… It’s brutal, but just do what you can to get back into routine and be gentle on yourself while your body readjusts.
Really the only thing to do is try your best to live according to the new timezone as soon as you arrive. Meals at normal times, bedtime at a reasonable hour for that timezone. It’ll take a couple of days to adjust but usually a full week to really, truly acclimate and coming home is always worse!
Also, last time I went to Europe I took a phernergen (an antihistamine) to help me sleep on the plane, and also for a couple of nights once I got home to help me sleep and not wake up at 3am! That definitely helped a lot!
What I advise you NOT to do is drink alcohol until you’re about a day into the new place. My cousin thought it would be a great idea to go drinking when we got to France (thinking it would keep him up and ready to party) and spent the later half of the afternoon puking onto the beach. He only had 3 drinks.
Weirdly, keeping moving seems to help. I know getting up and walking around is the last thing you want to do when jet lagged, but it does help. I went on an overseas school trip in college (in the dreaded west to east direction), and our first day there, just a couple hours after we arrived, we had a guided walking tour scheduled. I’m sure part of what helped was that we were college age, but also the walking did seem to help. We were all completely worn out, but we somehow mostly made it to bedtime without passing out in the park.
Just accept it. To or from the Antipodes is simply awful and not something human beings were designed to do. It’s like asking for recovery tips from open heart surgery or the French school system. I’ve done Antipodes flights about ten times and you just have to be prepared to spend a week feeling like ass.
All the advice about going outside and moving around in the morning does help, though, especially if you can make yourself go for a run.
For future Antipodeses runs – when you switch flights, make your layover last at least 12 hours, and rent an airport hotel room or a private sleeping room in one of the lounges, and shower and sleep. Or at least lie there in the dark for a bunch of time. It makes the ultimate arrival and adjustment a lot easier. Don’t tell me you can’t afford it. What you can’t afford is a flight to or from the Antipodes.
(Still ass though. Still a week of ass.)
This is probably too late, but I flew Dublin to San Francisco five times last year, and occasionally NY to SF now; it is ALL ABOUT vitamin D pills during the day (the ones with coconut oil are the best, IMO) and then melatonin at night, about an hour before you go to bed (again, liquid capsules are the best.) Nothing really helps to totally fix it, but those things make the day at least somewhat bearable. Also, sitting outside in the sunshine in the morning if you can bear it is great.
Give in and sleep for 48 hours, then have a chocolate croissant when you get up.
I did Tel Aviv > Los Angeles, and sleeping was the only thing that made it better.
If caffeine isn’t doing it for you, might I suggest exploring on your own? There is nothing like heading into a strange city by yourself (bonus points if you don’t speak the language) to keep you awake, simply by virtue of the urgent threat that being unconscious in the middle of a public space poses on your safety and well-being.
Try also: deep knee bends.
This is too late for you, but it can help to change your phone/watch to destination time as soon as you get through airport security, and then plan your plane sleep schedule accordingly. That way, when you get there, you are KIND OF mentally adjusted to the time zone? Idk.
This is what I do, except I start it even earlier — a day in advance of my flight if I can. And really think myself into it: consciously keep looking at my watch and saying things to myself like “I can’t believe I’m up at 4am” (local time: 9pm) or “Midnight, time to go to bed” (local time: 3pm). Doesn’t even matter so much whether I’m actually following that new sleep schedule, just so long as I’m consistently resetting my mental clock and trying to feel/internalize the new time. Get your emotions wrapped up into it! Get exasperated that the sun isn’t at the right place in the sky for the time your watch says it most definitely is!
YMMV, but in four transatlantic flights, I’ve only experienced jet lag once with this method, and it was stupidly minor (I woke up in the middle of the night for my first couple nights, then was able to go back to sleep). Otherwise I’ve felt essentially adjusted as soon as I landed, with about as much tiredness as I’d expect from a similar duration flight in a single time zone. I’ve had a couple friends also try this mental adjustment trick and they’ve reported similar results, to their and my surprise. No harm to try!
Funny, for me it's about the same either way. I dislike the home trip to Australia because of losing the day I gain going to the US.
Worst jet lag for me: Melbourne-Auckland-LA. It wasn’t so much the flight itself as getting slammed with my period while I slept on the plane (drenched pants despite super pad) and getting a cold as well, AND having to go to Yosemite the next morning in a car so badly packed it meant fitting myself around things for that long trip. Amazingly I felt almost human again after we got to our condo and I had copious cups of tea and cold pills. Plus, Yosemite!
Worst jet lag for me: Melbourne-Auckland-LA. It wasn't so much the flight itself as getting slammed with my period while I slept on the plane (drenched pants despite super pad) and getting a cold as well, AND having to go to Yosemite the next morning in a car so badly packed it meant fitting myself around things for that long trip. Amazingly I felt almost human again after we got to our condo and I had copious cups of tea and cold pills. Plus, Yosemite!
When I was in college my parents lived in Australia, so I experienced this on a regular basis. My college was in Massachusetts, so it was 24 hours of travel. Going USA to Australia, what worked was staying up late the night before (getting as little sleep as possible) then staying awake during the day part of the trip, getting on the plane and allowing myself to conk out. Going the other way- it works best if you arrive late at night (probably because the flight from LA to the east coast is inexplicably delayed)- go to bed and sleep. Get up, live an activish day and allow yourself to got to bed early (6 or 8 or whenever). It takes a couple of days.
I am pretty firmly on the no naps side.
Jet lag is always at its worst when people are expecting you to function as normal- it’s bad whichever way you go.
When I was in college my parents lived in Australia, so I experienced this on a regular basis. My college was in Massachusetts, so it was 24 hours of travel. Going USA to Australia, what worked was staying up late the night before (getting as little sleep as possible) then staying awake during the day part of the trip, getting on the plane and allowing myself to conk out. Going the other way- it works best if you arrive late at night (probably because the flight from LA to the east coast is inexplicably delayed)- go to bed and sleep. Get up, live an activish day and allow yourself to got to bed early (6 or 8 or whenever). It takes a couple of days.
I am pretty firmly on the no naps side.
Jet lag is always at its worst when people are expecting you to function as normal- it's bad whichever way you go.