Dealing with Time Zones
Apr 11th, 2007 by Nick
In January, Sydney is 17 hours ahead of the US Central Time Zone. The trip is about 27 hours including ground time on either end. So what is the best way to deal with the potential for jet lag?
The way I look at it, the time zone difference is the same as between Paris and Chicago: 7 hours. Sure, there’s the whole “what day is it” deal with the date line, but my metabolism doesn’t care about that. And I’ve done Europe to the US over a dozen times.
But there is a difference between Paris-Chicago and Chicago-Sydney: when I fly Europe to the US, I take the latest flight possible, land between 3-6pm, get home, get some food in me, stay awake until 8pm, and then get a good night’s sleep. In Sydney, I’m going to land at 8am, which means I have to stay awake for at least 10 hours.
Therefore my goal is to sleep from midnight-7am Sydney time. That way if I sleep poorly and get only 3-4 hours of “real” sleep, I will still have enough gas to get through Day 1. To accomplish that, the best thing for me to do is wait until 7am the night before my trip to go to sleep. That shouldn’t be a problem: I am a night owl anyway, and I stayed up all night before I went to Singapore, because I had a noon flight.
But I am a bit worried… Can I sleep from 7am-3pm, get up, and go to the airport? Or will I be so incredibly amped up that I will not be able to sleep? If that happens, I could end up sleeping the entire flight to LA, then be awake enough that I can’t sleep on the LA-Sydney flight.
There is a trick, however. But you have to wait until the next post to find out what is is… 
[…] my last post, I set up the problem for flying to Australia during the US Winter/Australian Summer: It is a 17 […]