Dealing With Jet Lag Symptoms By Breaking Up Your Journey

In its simplest form jet lag arises whenever you travel and the time recorded by your body's internal clock is out of sync with the actual time at your destination. For instance, if you depart from London at 9 pm and fly to Bangkok you will arrive roughly 13 hours later at 10 am London time the following morning. However, because you have flown across several time zones, the local time at Bangkok international airport is now 4 pm that same afternoon.

Having taken a taxi to your hotel, checked in had taken a shower your internal bod clock will now be telling you that it is time to have something to eat. Now, your body thinks that it is time for lunch 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. So far so good, however, three or four hours later when everyone else begins heading for bed your problems will start as your body clock still thinks it is now only late afternoon.

A time difference of 6 hours, like that shown in this illustration, is sizeable and most people would experience jet lag. Actually, although an hour or two will hardly produce any effect at all, anything over 4 hours can be expected to produce jet lag symptoms in most of us.

Naturally there are various things that you can do before your journey, during your flight and at your destination to help to counter jet lag but one difficulty which researchers have noted recently is that when your internal body clock experiences a significant shift in time it frequently overcompensates when adjusting itself and therefore leaves you suffering from a double dose of jet lag before it finally settles down. Against this background, how can you counteract this?

To a certain extent you can take this into account and reduce your jet lag symptoms by beginning to adjust your internal clock in advance of travel, but circumstances may make this difficult. One alternative therefore is simply to plan to break your journey whenever you are going to be traveling across more than four or five time zones.

For our illustrative trip to Bangkok this might for instance involve breaking your journey half way and relaxing for a day before continuing on. Air travel might have made the world smaller today but I'm afraid that it will take the human body a bit longer to catch up to modern technology.