How to Get Over Jet Lag Quickly

Traveling long distances can leave you feeling jet lagged. This exhausted feeling can make the first few days of your trip and your return home a bit rocky making it hard to enjoy your vacation to the full extent. Let’s take a look at what causes jet lag, how to prevent jet lag, and how to get over jet lag quickly to make the most of your travels!

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Table of Contents

What is Jet Lag?

Jet lag is defined as the extreme tiredness and other physical effects felt by a person after a long flight across several time zones.

As a traveler, experiencing jet lag is likely at some point throughout your travels. In essence, your internal clock will not be aligned to the new time zone you are visiting which may lead to trouble sleeping or staying awake. This largely will depend on if you are traveling east or west across multiple time zones.

Fortunately, jet lag is a short-term problem for most travelers. However, if you are frequently flying across time zones, like pilots or flight attendants, you may have increased trouble with keeping your sleep cycle in check. To better understand jet lag, you’ll need to know how to identify it.

The Effects of Jet Lag

Most of the symptoms of jet lag are tied to being tired and will resolve themselves once you “catch up on sleep”. These symptoms include:

Problems sleeping or sleepiness: Depending which direction (east or west) you traveled, your body may be out of whack and sleeping on your new schedule could be difficult.

Heightened emotions: Being tired can cause you to be a bit more irritable and quick to anger. This can be exasperated by also struggling with culture shock at your destination.

Impaired thinking: It can also be difficult to think straight and make good decisions when overly tired. This means you’ll need to take it slow upon arrival to make sure you don’t put yourself in potentially dangerous situations from sleep deprivation.

How to Prevent Jet Lag

Unfortunately, there are no foolproof tricks or tips on how to avoid jet lag, even if your body is a well run machine! However, you can do your best to prevent jet lag with a few helpful tips.

Focus on Quality Sleep

Leading up to your trip, you’ll want to make sure you’re well rested. Then having a day or two of disrupted sleep will not make you suffer as much from the effects of jet lag.

Additionally, you’ll want to prepare to sleep on the plane if you’re flying a long distance. This means packing the necessities, like a travel pillow, ear plugs, and eye mask. If you have trouble sleeping normally, you may also want to bring a sleep aid that your body is familiar with, like melatonin.

Eat & Drink Wisely

Travel days can wreak havoc on your body. Make sure to stay hydrated and eat balanced meals that aren’t too heavy. It can be really tempting to just fill up on airport or airplane snacks, but your body will thank you for trying to keep your meals regular.

Book Strategic Layovers

One of my favorite ways to “trick my body” into avoiding jet lag or faster recovery from jet lag is to book strategic layovers. This means if you’re flying long distances try to break up your flights so that you fly overnight and have your days somewhere.

For example when flying to Thailand from the United States, I might fly overnight from New York to Helsinki and then spend the day in Helsinki exploring and return to the airport for another overnight journey to Bangkok. This helps keep my body regulated to night time and daylight by shifting just a few hours at a time versus trying to tackle the extreme time differences all at once.

How to Overcome Jet Lag

If you’re looking for how to fix jet lag, there are a few things you can do upon arrival to help minimize the symptoms.

Ease into Your Trip

With the excitement of a vacation, it’s easy to try to over plan or overdo it when you first arrive. Ease into the first day or two of your trip to allow your body time to adjust and recover from the additional stress of travel.

This simply means not booking your days too full or trying to do a long day trip as soon as you arrive. Leave a bit more room for relaxation to ease into your trip.

Correct Your Sleep Schedule

Try to avoid napping and sleep on the schedule of the time zone you arrive in. This may mean having an early bedtime, but that’s a better option than taking a nap. If you start realigning your body’s internal clock on day one, it will help minimize the effects of jet lag.

Alternatively, if you nap when you arrive because you are tired, you will have trouble sleeping at night elongating the amount of time you feel out of whack.

Head Outside

To quickly readjust to the schedule of the timezone you’re in, spend some time outside. Whether you’re exploring, eating a meal outdoors, or simply taking a walk in a park, the exposure to daylight will help your body recalibrate.

Eat & Drink Smartly

The effects of long flights go beyond just being tired. Your body may be off from eating at odd times or potentially living off of airline or airport food for hours or days at a time. Give your body a balanced meal that is not too heavy to help you feel your best.

As a bonus, you should also limit your alcohol intake immediately after arrival. Alcohol is proven to negatively impact the quality of your sleep which will slow down how quickly you acclimate to your new time zone. Additionally, alcohol can attribute to dehydration, and long plane flights already make it difficult to stay hydrated.

How long does it take to recover from jet lag?

Overcoming jet lag takes varying periods of time for each individual. This is largely due to the number of factors that weigh in. However, as you learn what jet lag feels like and how to deal with jet lag, you’ll start to notice you may adjust faster or be able to power through it easier.

If you really want a range of time, the conservative timeframe for recovering from jet lag is about one day for each time zone crossed. However, if you start adjusting to the new time zone as soon as you land, you’ll likely stop feeling the effects of jet lag within a couple of days.

In case you have not noticed by now, there is no quick fix to cure jet lag. The good news though is you can get over jet lag quickly with these tips and tricks. You’ll be on your way to feeling refreshed in no time.

Find Other Helpful Traveling Tips

Getting over jet lag quickly will make traveling so much smoother. In fact, you may feel like a pro traveler in no time! Learn more tricks of the travel trade through these related posts.

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