My Approach to Jet Lag: Adjust in Advance
Apr 12th, 2007 by Nick
In my last post, I set up the problem for flying to Australia during the US Winter/Australian Summer: It is a 17 hour time zone difference, with an early morning arrival in Sydney. The best thing to do in order to get in a full day of sightseeing is to sleep as long as possible before leaving for the airport, and stay up for the first half of the LA-Sydney flight. But if you’re excited about a vacation, how can you sleep until 3 in the afternoon?
When I started thinking about this trip, one of my first questions was which day of the week I would leave. I settled on Tuesday for a number of reasons:
- It would put me in Uluru on Sunday - my experience with many vacations to Europe is that Sundays are the critical days for which to plan because so many things are closed. Even in America, many businesses have late start times on Sunday.
- For three weeks away, it would get me home on a Thursday - I can stumble through work on Friday and recover over the weekend.
- But most of all, it meant that I had three days of no work before the trip.
Having three days where I don’t have to maintain a traditional schedule means that I can adjust to Australian time before I even leave for the airport. Here’s how I will do it:
- Friday night, force myself to stay up until 3am, do not set an alarm but no matter what stay in bed until 11am
- Saturday night, force myself to stay up until 5am, wake up at noon
- Sunday night, force myself to stay up until 9am Monday morning, sleep only until 2pm
- Monday night (the night before the trip), let the last minute trip rush hit me, and stay up until 7am. Give my keys to the person driving me to the airport so that they can let themselves in at 3pm (which is 8am Sydney time, the time I am going to land the next day) to make sure I wake up.
This is a variation of what I have done for over a decade for travel to Europe. For those trips, I do the opposite: I wake up at 4am the two days before the trip, and 2am the day of the trip. By the time my 7pm flight rolls around, I’m sound asleep before the seat belt sign goes off.
The key to the plan is the short “night’s” worth of sleep on Monday morning. By jamming myself a little bit at that point, it gives me a counterbalance to the inevitable adrenaline rush that night, so that I will have to sleep on Tuesday morning.
