20/20: Creating Your Jet Lag Strategy

Dec. 1 -- If you are planning to spend several days or a few weeks in new lands, you’d be best served by timing your sleep very carefully right from the start.

By doing so, you’d stand a better chance that — sooner rather than later — your body will catch up with the environment.

In addition to making it through your journey feeling healthy and vital, you’ll also want to speed the rate at which your internal clock adjusts to the time in your new environment. No matter what you do, this process is apt to take at least a couple of days, but the more quickly and well you can sleep at the local bedtime and wake up feeling rested in the morning, the better. What follows are some tips to help you do just that:

Anticipate your new time zone. If you’re flying when it’s nighttime at your destination and it’ll be morning when you arrive, try to sleep on the plane. If it’s daytime, try to stay awake — no matter what time your body thinks it is at the moment — or at most catch a 20-minute power nap to take the edge off.

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Time your light exposure. We mean the light, especially the sunlight, to which you expose your body. Indeed, light therapy can be very helpful in resetting your internal clock—as long as you’re careful about when and how long to exposure yourself to it. Exposure to bright light in the morning will help shift you forward, allowing you to go to bed later and wake up earlier in the coming days. Bright light in the evening, on the other hand, will shift you back, so that you’re going to bed earlier and getting up later.

Jet Lag: Direction MattersThe direction of the flight you take significantly influences the degree of jet lag you experience. When you fly eastbound, or against the direction of the sun, jet lag tends to be more severe than when you fly west. That’s because when flying westward, you’re allowing your body to follow its natural inclination to extend the day to 25 hours. Your bedtime shifts forward, later and later. Let’s say you’re a Londoner and you travel to New York. Within five days, without even trying, your bedtime would quickly shift so that you’re going to bed on New York time.