How To Avoid Jet Lag – Part 2
On Wednesday, we said our farewells to Southern California and boarded our flight back to England; a 12 hour flight from West to East covering 8 timezones. After my success with making fast adjustments to my body clock on the outbound flight to San Diego, where I avoided jetlag almost entirely, I made similarly careful plans for this inbound flight.
Checking in 2 hours before take off at 3pm local time on Wednesday afternoon, and landing at 1pm local time the following day, we crossed 8 timezones West to East, effectively confusing our body clocks with a short 16 hour day. After collecting our luggage, and catching the bus back to Gloucester, we stepped through our front door at 8pm… a door-to-door journey time of 23 hours. My body clock feels as though I’m back on UK time already: It’s now 11pm on Friday, and I’m looking forward to a good seven hours sleep before waking around 6:30am tomorrow. Here’s how I did it:
- On Tuesday, go to bed as early as sensibly possible without laying awake in bed for too long. I was asleep by 10pm.
- Set your Wednesday morning alarm as early as you dare. I set mine for 5:30am. I probably should have tried to get up even earlier, but the idea of seeing a 4 in the hour digit on my clock still frightens me
- It’s crucial to set your watch to the destination timezone as soon as possible, without forcing yourself to be calculating back to your originating timezone. I changed mine while standing in line to show my boarding pass.
- Take as many short naps as you can during the journey. Within an hour of taking off for the main leg of the flight, I managed to take a nap for an hour and a half, waking up just before 6am according to my watch. I’m too tall to get comfortable enough to sleep much in economy class normally, so this was a real bonus.
- Upon arrival, don’t go to bed until you are sure you will sleep until close to your normal wake up time. Once we finally stepped through the front door, I still felt pretty tired, but decided to keep myself awake for another few hours, finally getting to sleep around 10pm.
Again, I’m relying on sleep deprivation to brute force my body clock into a new timezone. The key to traveling East seems to be treating the journey day and the following day as an immense 36-hour-plus long single day, napping when possible, with the goal of being ready for an “early night” at the end of it all to get a good night’s sleep and still get up at your normal time the following morning. This means that once you’ve found a good strategy for coping with a westbound 32 hour day, you can reuse it when traveling East too.
Normally I’ve found eastbound flights extremely hard to recover from, usually spending 3 or 4 days in jetlag as my bodyclock slowly adjusts to the new timezone, but this return trip was a breeze by comparison. I’ll be flying another 8 hours East to South East Asia in the Autumn, so I’ll try to refine this strategy and prove that it wasn’t just a fluke this time around.