Trying to sleep because of the lag may not work
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In the early stages of our relationship, my husband started taking a series of photos of me on our travels. In everything, I am asleep: I sat in a chair in the Orsay museum in Paris. Head on chest in the back seat of a car in Kiev, Ukraine. On a train in France, mouth open, drooling. He is lucky I still married him.
This article is part of a special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here.
Jet lag is definitely not pretty. In addition to feeling tired or awake at the wrong time of day, a long flight across time zones can also cause gastrointestinal distress, abnormal body temperature, headaches, irritability, and cognitive impairment, all of which are much more serious. for people who fly all the time, such as airline pilots. What can we do?
Many of us approach jet lag by prioritizing sleep whenever we can to combat fatigue. Also National Health Service England website recommends “shifting your sleep schedule to the new time zone as soon as possible,” and many of us try to eliminate it on overnight flights (often with the help of over-the-counter medications or in-flight refreshments).
While this approach is not always wrong, it can sometimes do more harm than good. Instead, we need to think about jet lag in a more nuanced way, he says Steven LockleyHe was a neuroscientist at Harvard University Medical School. “Jet lag is really…
