![]() ![]() She also drank water at every opportunity and practised yoga before she slept at her destination, to help her wind down. “I switched from coffee to matcha tea with almond milk and I think that made me feel better,” she says. Her remedy was to keep up the routines that she already knew would be good for her body and mind. “And when you’re tired, you don’t know if you’re hungry, if you want to sleep or you want to cry.”Ĭhia and watermelon juice is Kara Mulder’s in-flight snack of choice (when liquid restrictions allow). It was so stressful and wreaked havoc on your body.” “You just rested where you could and then kept going. “Your body never had time to adjust to anything,” she says of working back-to-back routes between the USA and Europe. Kara Mulder a former commercial and current corporate flight attendant, who now writes about life in the air at, says that when she was regularly flying long-haul, the turnaround times on the ground were sometimes so short that jet lag barely had time to set in. Plus, says Thorpe: “The quality of sleep you get on a flight is always going to be horrendous anyway … So it’s really not worth the effort.” The flight attendant’s method: nourish yourself properly ![]() He makes an effort to get between eight and ten hours’ of shut-eye each night for a week before departure.ĭoctors have also told Thorpe and his team not to bother trying to “adjust” to their destination’s time zone by fiddling with their sleep times on the flight, which fits with Dr Postnova’s admission that deliberately adjusting your own internal clock can be error-prone. “We’re told that the sleep in the week before we travel is our most important sleep,” Thorpe says. You need to account for how far ahead or behind the destination is from your home, and whether you’re flying east or west. If you’re not flying on a light-optimised flight, you could try to adjust your light exposure yourself, though Postnova acknowledges this can be “tricky”. “And we also saw that their objective alertness was higher for two days after the flight.” “Self-reported jet lag was shorter in the optimised group,” Postnova says. Instead of keeping the cabin in darkness for most of the journey, which is what airlines typically do, the scientists tailored the timing of light exposure on the flights to help their subjects shift their clocks in the right direction.Ĭompared with a control group, their findings were small-scale but promising. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning With this front of mind, Postnova and her colleagues have been conducting experiments with Qantas, to see if adjusting the lights on long-haul flights – such as the new 16-hour non-stop flight from Auckland to New York – helps minimise jet lag. ![]() Sitting in bright light at the right time of day or night either delays or advances your circadian clock, bringing it closer to the environment you’re travelling to. Photograph: James D Morgan/Qantasīy controlling your light exposure, you can help those clocks adjust. An experimental Qantas flight from Sydney to New York in 2019, where University of Sydney researchers adjusted passengers’ light exposure in the hopes of reducing jet lag. ![]()
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