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Jet
Lag |
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Why are you that snappy with the cab driver for not picking your
bag? Finally you are on your way home from the airport, after a long-
haul trip, why are you so irritable? You should be elated.
For the next few days, you are nervous, exhausted, short-tempered and
unable to concentrate. Your sleep is fractionated, meaning you sleep
a few hours, then wake up in the middle of the night, unable to fall
asleep again. You have to pee when everyone is asleep. The next
day, you feel so tired at work that you want to hide under your desk
for a snooze a la George Constanza.
Your energy is gone, so is your sexual drive. Your mouth is dry, your
appetite is either poor or subjected to untimely feeding binges.
This sounds pretty much like endogenous depression or an anxiety
syndrome. Fortunately, it is not. It is only jet lag, a syndrome
that plagues 96% of long distance travelers (as per the 1994 New
Zealand study of flight attendants).
It will go away. When? According to NASA, it takes one day per time
zone crossed to reset your body clock, and get you out of the
marasm. Others contend it that takes one day per hour of time
difference between your point of origin and your destination (18
hours between New Zealand and New York, 18 days to get rid of jet
lag!)
Jet lag is worse when you travel eastbound (e.g. New York to Paris)
than when you travel westbound (e.g. New York to Los Angeles).
Long-distance travel per se, though a cause for tiredness, does not
cause the panoply of jet lag symptoms. Going through time zones is
the root of the problem. This implies you will be far sicker after a
six-hour hop to London from New York, than after a ten-hour trip to
Rio. The former is a West-East flight over five time zones, the
latter a North-South getaway involving only two time zones.
How do you prevent jet lag? That is the question. The lay and
medical literatures propose an assortment of difficult, invalid or
untested solutions.
Sleeping comfortably the nights before the long trip is almost an
oxymoron. At destination, eating, dining and sleeping at home time
is not feasible either. Nevertheless, alcohol, coffee, tea, and
other stimulants seem to worsen the problem; they should henceforth
be avoided.
Multivitamins, so-called time-zone diets, and a number of other fads
are recommended, but none has been proven to make a difference in
comparative studies.
The most popular remedy is melatonin. This substance, natural to
the human body, found at higher blood concentration during sleep,
seems to improve the ills of jet lag, when taken daily starting one
or two nights before departure until after the return trip.
Melatonin can be bought over the counter. At what dose should it be
taken? No one is sure. Users take an average of 1 to 5 mg a day. If
you take it, be aware that melatonin bears its own side effects such
as shrinking of your gonads (testes and ovaries), with whatever
consequences may ensue….
Odler Jeanlouie, Monday, December 10. 2001)
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