Some years back, in my former life as a retail manager, I spent a beautiful spring week in sunny Los Angeles at a trade show. I suppose it was beautiful…the vast majority of my time was spent on the floor of the convention center, and at the end of it all, the attendees were all very much in need of some good old-fashioned release. After many hours of howling at the moon, and a couple of hours of barely restful sleep, I crawled out of bed and headed to the airport to return to the cold & rain that the mountains just never quite seem ready to let go of at the end of winter. And since too much is never enough, I had to contend with the fact that the morning that I tottered into LAX to catch that flight back to North Carolina was also the dreaded first morning of Daylight Savings Time. My most ever-needed hour of sleep on loan until November.
Spring forward. Spring. Clocks used to have springs, and mine was clearly broken. And that’s how I learned all about jet lag. Every morning was a struggle for the next week. Cold, damp shadowless days under a sky the color of low-grade aluminum. It took me the entire week to feel marginally human again. The extreme nature of this episode aside, every spring and every autumn, I still have to deal with something very much like jet lag. And I’ve learned how to make it as painless as possible until the day that someone decides to to stop the madness, and leave the time alone forever and evermore.
My case was truly the perfect storm of circadian rhythm disruptions. A week under artificial lighting with little to no actual sunlight (what a waste of a trip to California). A night of Dionysian excess to wrap up my trip. Five hours of canned air on an eastward flight across three time zones, with that extra bit of savagery from the clocks moving forward an additional hour. And nothing to greet me except more no sunlight. Now the regular shifts back and forth between standard time and Daylight Savings Time may not be as bad as my ridiculous example, but they certainly manage to grind my gears all the same.
So what have I learned? The first thing I learned is that there’s an upscale name for jet lag that all the cool scientists use: desynchronosis. Set a personal goal to work that into casual conversation this week. Your friends and coworkers will be impressed, and it’s current, with the clocks having changed and such.
Pro Tips:
Pro tip #1: Breathe. Studies have shown a correlation between low levels of environmental oxygen and susceptibility to jet lag. Conversely, increasing your oxygen levels can go a long ways towards getting your internal clock back on track.
Pro tip #2: Drink up. Not like I did before my flight. Water, water and more water. This is a good habit to get into anyway, so go ahead and do it. Dehydration just makes everything worse.
Pro tip #3: Drink up (again). This time, if caffeine is your thing, an early morning dose of it can increase alertness and tell your body that it’s morning, rewiring those circuits and getting you back more to a normal existence.
Pro tip #4: Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine! Exposure to direct sunlight is maybe the best way to get yourself back to normal in a hurry. Your body can take subtle cues from its surroundings that help retrain that internal clock and bring everything back into line until the powers that be see fit to monkey with the time once again.
Pro tip #5: https://enddaylightsavingtime.org/sign-the-petition/
