Trying to sleep through jet lag may not actually work
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In the first flow of our relationship, my husband started taking a series of photos of me during our travels. In each of them, I am asleep: I sat in a chair at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. My head is on my chest in the back seat of a car in Kyiv, Ukraine. On a train in France, mouth open, drooling. He’s lucky I’m still married to him.
This article is part of a special series examining basic questions related to sleep. Read more here.
Jet lag certainly isn’t pretty. Other than leaving you feeling exhausted—or completely 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 far more serious. For people who travel all the time, like airline pilots. What can we do?
Many of us deal with jet lag by prioritizing sleep whenever possible, in order to combat fatigue. until National Health Service England website “Change your sleep schedule to the new time zone as soon as possible,” she recommends, and many of us try to tire ourselves out on overnight flights (often with the help of over-the-counter medications or in-flight moisturizers). .
Although 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 Stephen Lockleya neuroscientist who was at Harvard Medical School. “Jet lag is actually…
