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

Jet lag occurs when you are traveling 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 leave London at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok you will land approximately 13 hours later at 10 am London time the next morning. But, because you have flown across several time zones, the local time at Bangkok international airport is now 4 pm on the day following your departure from London.

After you have traveled to your hotel, checked in and taken a shower your body will now tell you that it is time to eat. Now, your body clock thinks that it is lunchtime and, although everyone else is having dinner, your internal clock doesn’t mind what you call the meal, it only cares that you eat. At this stage everything is fine, however, three or four hours later when everybody begins going to bed your problems will start as your body clock believes it is now only late afternoon.

A time variation of 6 hours, such as that shown here, is substantial and most people would experience jet lag. Actually, although an hour or two will hardly be noticeable, anything over 4 hours will produce the symptoms of jet lag in most of us.

Naturally there are various things that you can do before 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 when your 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 eventually settles down. So, how do you compensate for this?

Well, it is possible to take this into account to a certain extent and reduce any jet lag symptoms by beginning to adjust your body clock before travelling, but circumstances could make this difficult. An alternative course of action therefore is to simply plan to break your journey whenever you are going to be traveling across more than four or five time zones.

For our trip to Bangkok this might for instance involve breaking your journey half way and relaxing for a day 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 little bit longer to catch up to modern technology.