Lowering The Symptoms Of Jet Lag By Breaking Up Your Journey

November 8th, 2008 Posted in Airline Flight Insurance

Jet lag arises whenever you travel and you internal body clock’s time is out of sync with the actual 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. However, because you have traveled across a number of time zones, local time at Bangkok international airport is now 4 pm that same afternoon.

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 thinks that it is lunchtime and, despite of the fact that everybody else will be having dinner, your internal clock doesn’t mind what you call the meal, it is only interested in the fact that it is time to eat. At this stage everything is fine, however, a couple of hours later when everyone else begins heading for bed your problems will begin as your body clock believes it is now only late afternoon.

A time variation of 6 hours, like that shown in this illustration, is significant and most people would feel jet lag. Indeed, although a couple of hours will hardly be noticeable, anything over about 4 hours will produce the symptoms of jet lag in most people.

There are of course a number of things which you can do before your journey, during the course of your flight and after your arrival at your destination to help to counter jet lag but one difficulty that researchers have noted recently is that whenever your internal body clock experiences a large shift in time it usually overcompensates when adjusting itself and therefore leaves you suffering a double dose of jet lag for a while before it eventually settles down. So, how can you compensate for this?

To a certain extent you can take this into account and reduce any jet lag symptoms by beginning to adjust your internal clock before you travel, although your personal circumstances may make this difficult. One alternative course of action therefore is to simply plan to break your journey if you are traveling across more than four or five time zones.

In the case of our trip to Thailand this could for example involve breaking your journey half way and resting for a day before continuing on. Today’s air travel may have made the world smaller but I’m afraid that it is going to take the human body a bit longer to catch up with technology.