Conductors and Jet Lag - Part 2
By Sasha Mäkilä on Wednesday 4 January 2012, 00:33 - Permalink
When I am flying west, from Europe to the US, I usually start adjusting my body clock to the time of the destination several days in advance. That means, I will shamelessly sleep in and stay up late! For most people this is easy, since our normal body clock prefers a day slightly longer than 24 hours. And for most people it's also much easier to stay up later than get up earlier - no self discipline required here! Of course, this works only if you are your own boss (if you have to be at work by 9AM you hardly can stay in bed until 11AM like I did today!). My ideal is a gradual adjustment, adding maybe a half an hour to each day for a week, so that my bedtime would shift from 12 midnight to about 3AM before the day of departure.
Another thing to do is to adjust your meal times accordingly. Of course, when the time difference is 7 or 8 hours it is not practical to adjust completely, but even a couple of hours will make your life easier in the destination.
During the flight it is important to rest as much as possible. Set your clock in the destination time right away and when it is sleepy time "there" try to relax and use sleep mask and earplugs if necessary. Use caffeine (tea, coffee, energy drinks) strategically - only take them during the flight when it is morning or daytime in the destination. I used to stay awake the whole westward flight to just stretch my day from 24 to 32 hours, but these days I prefer sleeping the first half of the flight if it is a morning flight.
There are a couple of web resources that every jet-setting maestro should know. A commercial website called Pilot Paul's Travel Accessories has the best list of jet lag travel tips I have found anywhere in the internet. There are also several sites with jet lag calculators that show you when approximately your body will be most alert and most sleepy so that you can fight it by spending your time in bright light for example. I haven't used lightboxes or the newest fad "light earplugs" so I cannot tell how much they help. I might try them at some point, so if you have experience of them leave a comment below.
In my next posts on the topic - more on adjusting and on flying east!
Comments
Ok an answer to my previous comment in part 1.
It is interesting that you comment on the practicality of some jet lag recommendations. For example how much control you have over your day and
the use of caffeine. I don't think a lot of fliers have the luxury of being able to control these variables as caffeine is so common place and even though many do control their day to day workload demands made by others can often interfere with that balance. As a frequent flier the question I always ask is are the fundamental principles for healthy flying always being observed?
Conductors are lucky in that most of us can control our own schedules and usually it is possible to leave enough time in between the concert weeks for study of new material - and adjusting! I agree that most heavy coffee drinkers will not be able to benefit in regulating the caffeine intake. I also prefer healthy and safe methods to heavy drugs (or heavy drinking) to knock out your body clock. If you have any good ideas or resources let me know in the comments!