
Trying to sleep through jet lag may not actually work
Iakovos Hatzistavrou/AFP via Getty Images
Soon after our relationship started, my husband started taking photos of me while traveling. In each piece, I’m asleep in a chair in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. He hit his head against my chest in the back seat of a car in Kiev, Ukraine. Drooling with his mouth open on a train in France. He was lucky I was still married to him.
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Jet lag is certainly not good. In addition to feeling tired and waking up at the wrong time of day, long flights across time zones can cause gastrointestinal upset, body temperature abnormalities, headaches, irritability, and cognitive impairment. and these are all much more serious. For people who fly all the time, such as airline pilots. What can you do?
Many of us deal with jet lag by prioritizing sleep as much as possible to combat fatigue. Even the UK’s National Health Service website recommends “changing your sleep schedule to your new time zone as soon as possible”, and many of us are advised to “change your sleep schedule to your new time zone as soon as possible”, and many of us are advised to do so on overnight flights (often with the help of a plane). I’m trying to distract myself. over-the-counter medicines or in-flight meals).
This approach is not necessarily wrong, but it can do more harm than good in some cases. Instead, we need to think about jet lag from a more nuanced perspective, says Stephen Lockley, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Jet lag really exists…”