Beating Jet Lag

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I've spent 27 of the last 96 hours on Amtrak. I'm disoriented and irritable, my body aches, and I'm eating and sleeping at odd hours. In short, I'm jet-lagged.

At least by definition, I can't have jet lag because my North-South trains didn't cross any time zones and wouldn't have screwed up my internal body clock. Besides, train travelers aren't supposed to get jet lag. That's why it's called jet lag. And after 30 years on the road, sometimes flying nonstop for as long as 18 hours at a time, I generally don't have issues with jet lag.

But I know jet lag when I experience it. And that may tell you all you need to know about the topic. Fifty years after the first commercial-jet flights began to inflict jet lag on travelers, the condition and its effect on our minds and bodies is still a matter of fierce medical debate, a topic of endless discussion among business travelers, and a fertile market for any huckster with a purported cure.

When I edited Frequent Flyer magazine almost 20 years ago, I counted more than 150 items touted as jet-lag cures or preventatives. There were pills, potions, diets, software programs, books, drugs, exercises, gadgets like light boxes, and watches with special faces, and even a former flight attendant who claimed feel-good visualizations and mantras were the ticket. When I googled the term "jet lag" today, I got more than 5.4 million hits. The watch and the former flight attendant are still around, by the way.

All this may sound silly, but jet lag is serious business for business travelers and the companies that send executives around the globe. Many firms are so concerned about the mind-numbing and strength-sapping effects of jet lag that they bar employees from negotiating or signing contracts for the first 24 hours after they fly.

The real-life impact of jet lag is easier to describe than its cause. Consult the Centers for Disease Control, for example, and you'll get this bit of gobbledegook: The term "jet lag" is used to describe symptoms that result from temporary de-synchronization of circadian rhythm between a traveler's internal clock and the external environment.

In plain English, we're creatures of habit and our minds and our bodies expect predictable cycles of night and day, waking and sleeping, eating and hydration. Your body's rhythms get confused when you move too rapidly between time zones and it is suddenly confronted with new periods of daylight, sleeping, and nutrition. Our bodies eventually adjust to the rhythmic changes, of course, but much more slowly than jet travel moves us. Some experts say that the recovery rate is as slow as one day for each time zone you cross.

Travelers are naturally eager to speed up the adjustment process or negate the effects of jet lag altogether. The problem? Since jet lag affects everyone differently, there is no sure cure, and no way to separate the good treatments from the bad.

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