For many travellers who cross several time zones, the exhilaration of taking in sights like the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids of Egypt is quickly tempered by the grogginess of jet lag.
Veteran flyers often have their own remedies to overcome those signals from the body that it’s time for sleep. But an Oregon researcher recently detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine three basic strategies for overcoming jet lag.
Reset the circadian clock that tells a person to stay awake during the day and sleep at night. You can do this by taking the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, timing your exposure to bright light, or both.
Adjust your sleep schedule. Take short naps if you are sleepy the first few days after arrival. If you can, shift your sleep schedule by a couple of hours before travel.
Use medications to get to sleep or stay awake. Or turn to the old reliable remedy for keeping your eyes open: caffeine.
“We have mechanisms to adjust our clocks, but those mechanisms have to be called on to go into high gear,” said Robert Sack, a psychiatry professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon, whose article takes a science-based look at jet lag remedies. Sack said melatonin is the most extensively studied jet lag treatment, with a majority of double-blind, placebo-controlled trials showing it helped symptoms.
“Its effect is based in good science,” said Sack. He said the US Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated melatonin, but no significant adverse effects have been reported.