Cure Jet Lag and Look Cool Doing It

If you have traveled a far distance across a couple of time zones, you have no doubt had to deal with jet lag. The change in time zones makes you mentally think it is a certain time while your body is not able to adjust as quick to the change in time. Just because the clock says that it is bedtime, doesn't mean that it really is. Sleep experts have concluded that wearing your sunglasses while on the plane will help to lower the symptoms of jet lag.

British Airways contacted The Edinburgh Sleep Centre (ESC) to have them figure out ways that people can correct their internal body clocks when traveling through different time zones. The ESC concluded that the way to reduce the effects of jet lag is for passengers to adjust their light patterns. To do this, they advised travelers to wear their sunglasses during the final quarter of the overnight flight and to continue wearing the sunglasses for several hours after landing. The leader of the study, Dr. Chris Idzikowski, said, "The internal body clock steps up at dawn which is when we can manipulate exposure to light, it's a way of fooling the biological clock." Not doing anything to manipulate your light exposure will make it so that it takes one day for you to recuperate for every house of time difference travelled heading west. "It takes five days to recover from a five hour flight to New York from Britain and 50 per cent longer when flying eastwards," said Dr. Idzikowski.

While doing the study which observed more than one thousand passengers they found out that about two-thirds of the people they observed did not know a way to deal with jet lag. Many of those two-thirds would try to use other coping mechanisms like trying to drink alcohol to get through it or by simply just trying to ignore it. Some of the people knew some of the tricks, but failed in trying some coping mechanisms. Using the right combination of food and fluids, exercise, and of course, light exposure, only 11 percent correctly handled the problem of jet lag.

The website TravelSense offers some other tips for travelers to combat jet lag: