Remote work is excellent. It has a lot of benefits; it saves you time on the commute, and it helps with life and work balance. And what’s been important recently, it limits your exposure during seasonal flu outbreaks. Technology, team agreement and procedures can help with day-to-day team operations, but nothing will replace face-to-face communication. Even fully remote teams and whole companies must meet every so often to ponder on the past, plan the future and just spend some time together. That means travel. And that usually means long flights, at least for some members of the team. Is there anything we can do to be prepared for a long trip? How can we mitigate JetLag?
What is actually JetLag?
Some people will still argue this fact, but the Earth is round, and it rotates around the Sun. One rotation takes approximately 24 hours. Approximately, because the exact number is larger and this is why we have a leap year. For the sake of simplicity, the early cartographers divided the globe initially into two halves, the West and the East, and later into 24 zones, reflecting 24 hours of Earth’s rotation around the Sun. We have 180 degrees east and 180 degrees west. In total it’s 360. 360 decided by 24 gives us 15 degrees. When we travel and traverse 15 degrees, we move into a new time zone. It was not an issue in the past. People travelled mainly on boats. It took a while, and it allowed for adapting.
The cost of being fast
It did change however in the 1960s when the first commercial jet flight took place moving passengers from one continent to another, not in days or weeks like it used to be – but in hours. Short travel and multiple time zones that are being skipped at a fast pace make our body clock deregulate and circadian rhythm loses its synchronisation. Our body just lags behind the too rapid movement and is not able to keep and adapt to the new dust and dawn times, hence the JetLag.
When we study symptoms, they could be confused with some severe diseases: insomnia and excessive sleepiness, daytime fatigue and concentration deficiency, and also in extreme occasions – mood swings, constipation and even diarrhoea.
How to mitigate JetLag – before the trip
The question is, can we somehow mitigate the jag lag? Or perhaps reduce some symptoms? The answer is as usual – it depends. We cannot really eliminate it totally. We can only try to prepare a little bit, and follow particular protocol to mitigate some symptoms. But in the end, our body will need to do all the hard work to adapt and accommodate to the new situation.
Autopilot – create a standard operating procedure
Before we go to the nitty-gritty of mitigating the jet lat. I would like to point to one important topic related to the fatigue that jet lag will create. We should prepare the usual stuff – packing, making sure we have all the needed documents, reservations etc. We should also create a standard operating procedure for the time between landing and crashing into the bed in a hotel at our destination. The trip fatigue and jet lag will cause severe degradation in our ability to think clearly so we need to put things on autopilot. We make it a habit by repeating the sequence of actions every time we travel:
- check if you take all your belongings with you,
- have a usual place for typical items – a phone always go to this pocket, passports always go to that place,
- the baggage and children count performed etc. 🙂
- have your itinerary ready to answer the question from border control officers, order a taxi to the hotel etc.
A great way of taking care of your “Standard Operating Procedures” is the template function that offers one of my favourite ToDo Apps: Nozbe (affiliate link below).
Pre-trip adaptation – light exposure
Regarding jet lag itself – there is a minimal amount of things we can do before the actual trip. I can think of only two items.
We can try to adapt to the new time zone regarding the sleeping schedule and eating schedule. For some people it will not be much of a problem, some others will find it virtually impossibly due to commitments. I usually do nothing in this manner. I have a specific schedule at work and some commitments in family life. And I cannot afford to have meals separately and go to sleep before my kids, for instance.
💡 However, if you can do it, it is worth shifting your schedule towards the target time zone. It will be easier later. A few practical tips:
- if you need to shorten your day – try to use curtains that will cut the light almost entirely and go to bed earlier,
- if you need to lengthen your day – try to use the light that imitates the sunlight and stay longer,
- insulin level gets lower overnight
- try to shift your meals to your new time zone schedule, eating affects your insulin level, and insulin level directly affects your body timekeeping.
How to mitigate JetLag – things you can do during the trip ✈️
One of the schools of travellers promote the following scenario: aboard the plane, listening to safety procedure, asking for lots of booze and quickly falling to sleep. It may work for some people to help them to get to sleep. But the quality of this sleep, and later, the quality of the time when they wake up is questionable. We should drink a lot, but it should not be alcohol.
Drink the right liquids
Another popular scenario is to have one of those productive, quiet times. Drink a lot of caffeine, stay hyperactive and muscle through the journey. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of quiet time. I love to have a good read and listen to stuff that I usually don’t have time for. It becomes to be problematic when I try to force myself to stay focused. The natural instinct is to have an extra dose of caffeine intake.
The main issue is that alcohol and caffeine will dehydrate your body. Alcohol will deregulate your heartbeats and also will affect your situational awareness. Coffee will work temporarily and will make the overall process of jet lag recovery even longer and more painful later.
Hydrate
What we should drink instead is a lot of Water. The air conditioning in the aircraft makes the air very dry. We sit there for hours. This position and the length of a journey add to tiredness and fatigue. Also if we already have had good coffee at the airport – the result is that we very quickly get dehydrated. It may cause irritation, and headaches and magnify fatigue.
The general rule that I found on the interwebs is this:
- 1 litre of water for every 3 hours of flight
- in other words: 230 ml (one glass) per flight hour
- If I fly for 8 hours, I should drink not less than 2 litres of water.
There is a good tip on how to check your body hydration:
- drying skin and the best place to check is the tip of your elbow, if it is becoming dry, white and crumbly – you should ask for a bottle of water and drink.
Do you need to eat?
When we are on the drinking topic, let’s touch on eating on board as well. The food quality in the majority of the airlines is poor. I don’t mean that it will cause food poisoning, but it’s far from being healthy, it usually is served at a time when it suits the flight schedule, not your trip schedule and so on. The best idea that I implement recently is to skip the meals altogether. I usually have some energy bars, and I stick to drinking a lot of water and juices.
How to mitigate the JetLag – after the trip
You made it. The long and exhausting flight is over. What can we do now to make sure that recovery from jet lag will be somehow easier?
Move
You were sitting for hours, and your body, although exhausted, craves some moves. You don’t need to run a marathon, but some running or jogging may actually help. I usually go very fast through the airport itself, straights after the flight. It also helps to be the first to passport control, and customs and in general shortens the time needed to go to bed.
Eat
I covered eating in the pre-trip preparation section. It is good to finish your long day with healthy easy digestible food. I usually skip the meals served during the flight, so by the time I reach the hotel, I am actually quite hungry. But even if you do not feel super hungry, it is good to eat a light dinner. The whole point is to help your body to reset your clock. It included an eating schedule. This will help to regulate the insulin level, which directly affects the timekeeping “machinery” in our body.
Recovery time
How long will it take to fully recover? I tried to do a bit of research on this topic. But as usual – the answer is – it depends.
My experience is that it will take one day per hour of the time difference. If I travel to Vancouver, which is 8 hours ahead of London, I will need 8 days (!) to be fully recovered, and fully operational. It is worth keeping in mind. It is fine you feel fatigued, you are not been 100% efficient for more than a week. We live in a machoism word, where everyone pretends to be super-human, trying to attend all meetings, and be super productive the next day after red eyes trip. It is a lie, similarly to a myth of time management. Let’s take it easy on our bodies and make sure we still enjoy travelling, even when we are still yawning after that last long trip.
Lessons learned during this coffee journey ☕️
- The Earth is round 😁 when we fly long distances we traverse a few time zones, our internal clock does not keep up on the new sunset and dawn schedules – it causes jet lag.
- We cannot really eliminate it, but we can mitigate jet lag by trying to adapt to the new schedule.
- During the trip we should avoid drinking coffee and alcohol – we should drink plenty of water.
- The key to helping our body to adapt to the new times is to adjust to a new eating schedule.
- After a long time of sitting – we should move – this is true not only for flying 🙂
- It takes a long time to recover – allow for it, take it easy, life is not all about work.
Cover photo: Spain 2019
Useful Links
Fun fact – what time is it at poles?
Do you have your own protocol to mitigate jet lag?
Thanks for reading!
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