Traveling across several time zones is always stressful for the body. Many sources offer dozens of tips on how to adapt quickly: don’t drink coffee, change your clocks, wear sunglasses, change your sleep schedule in advance.
However, in practice, most of these recommendations are either difficult to implement, or they have too weak an effect.
Onย dtformat.com, we work a lot with time and date-related tools, so we decided to analyze why popular advice often doesn’t work in real life.
Theoretical recommendations vs. the reality of traveling
Preparing sleep in advance
Many people advise to go to bed earlier or later in advance, depending on the direction of the flight. But the modern rhythm of life – work, family, errands – often leaves no room for such experiments.
Even if you start changing your sleeping schedule a few days before your flight, the effect will be minimal: one or two hours of shifted sleep will not compensate for the six- or nine-hour difference.
Change the clock to the new time
Changing the clocks immediately after landing is a nice psychological idea. But your body will still be guided not by the numbers on the display, but by your actual internal biorhythms.
Just seeing the new time on the clock is not enough to throw off your usual sleep and wakefulness mechanisms.
Avoiding caffeine and alcohol
In theory, avoiding coffee and alcohol should help. In practice, on long flights, people often resort to caffeine to cope with fatigue and to avoid falling asleep โat the wrong timeโ.
Giving up altogether can lead to even more lethargy and discomfort, especially in those who are used to regular stimulation with coffee or tea.
Physical activity and lots of water
Moving around on an airplane and drinking lots of water is good for your health, but it has little or no effect on realigning your circadian rhythms.
Leg swelling or dehydration is associated with flying, but biorhythms are regulated mainly by light and melatonin, not by the number of steps or water.
Controlling daytime naps
Many recommendations prohibit daytime naps after arrival. But if your body requires rest after a sleepless night on the plane, trying to force awake will only make your overall health worse.
Sometimes 20-30 minutes of sleep can be more beneficial than suffering from fatigue for hours.
Why there are no one-size-fits-all solutions
Too different chronotypes
Even among the advice there are references to different chronotypes: โowlsโ, โlarksโ, โdolphinsโ and โbearsโ.
This means that there can be no universal recommendations – it is easier for someone to stay awake on someone else’s time, and someone else will suffer, no matter how much he tries to โadjustโ.
Light and sunbathing don’t always help
The advice to spend as much time in the sun as possible only works where the sun really is. If you’ve flown to a northern country in the winter or overnight to the tropics, catching the sun’s rays won’t work.
Stress, immunity and chronic diseases
The stress of changing time zones can exacerbate chronic illnesses, no matter how carefully you follow instructions.
No amount of prepared first aid kit can undo the fact that a major change of pace is always a challenge for the body.
