Grow Youthful: How to Slow Your Aging and Enjoy Extraordinary Health
Grow Youthful: How to Slow Your Aging and Enjoy Extraordinary Health

Jet lag

What is jet lag?

Aerotoxic syndrome

Time zone adjustment using pulsed light

Other prevention / remedies / cures / treatment for jet lag

References

What is jet lag?

Jet lag is tiredness, disruption and insomnia caused by travelling through one or more time zones. The shortening or lengthening of your day forces you into a new sleep-wake cycle. The circadian rhythms that dictate times for sleeping, eating, hormone regulation and body temperature variations are upset by your new location. To the degree that the body cannot immediately realign these rhythms, it is jet lagged.

You may want to wake at night or sleep during the day until you adjust to the new time zone. Other symptoms of jet lag can include fatigue, disorientation, irritability, poor concentration, loss of appetite, diarrhoea, constipation or headaches.

The rule of thumb it that it takes about one day to adjust to a one-hour time zone change. Most people need to cross three or more time zones to feel the effects of jet lag. Travelling from west to east is usually more disruptive, as you have a shortened day and have to get up earlier the next morning. Recovery is typically 1 day per eastward time zone, compared to 1 day per 1.5 westward time zones.

Aerotoxic syndrome

Aerotoxic Syndrome is any illness caused by exposure to contaminated air in jet aircraft. All passenger jet aircraft except one new model use bleed air to provide fresh air for those inside. Bleed air is compressed air taken from the compressor stage of the jet engines and then piped through to the inside of the aircraft. The air does go through a filter, but a small percentage of some extremely toxic jet engine contaminants still get through. Worse, there are rare fume events in which an engine seal leaks or something else goes wrong. A fume event can give a major toxic dose to passengers and crew. Details and what to do at aerotoxic syndrome.

Time zone adjustment using pulsed light

A paper (1) published in 2016 by researchers at Stanford University asserts that flashes of light can quickly adjust for the effects of jet lag. The researchers subjected the study's participants to brief, frequent flashes of light while they slept, and this seemed to alter their natural circadian rhythms and trick them into thinking they were on a different schedule.

It was even more effective if the travellers were exposed to an hour of intermittent light flashes while sleeping in the early morning, the night before their flight. Their bodies were somehow fooled into thinking the sun had risen three hours earlier.

Other scientists have previously experimented with exposure to continuous light to try to alter the body's circadian rhythms. But according to the Stanford researchers, continuous light shifted a person's internal clock by just 36 minutes. In contrast, a two-millisecond flash of light every 10 seconds advanced the participants clocks by an average of nearly two hours, and sometimes more.

The Stanford team is developing a new sleep mask with LED lights for the consumer market. You will be able to program it with your smartphone.

Prevention / remedies / cures / treatment for jet lag

If you use any of these remedies, please come back next week (or whenever you have an outcome) and let us know about your experience. Please leave a comment as many people are interested.

See details of remedies recommended by Grow Youthful visitors, and their experience with them.


References

1. Raymond P. Najjar, Jamie M. Zeitzer. Temporal integration of light flashes by the human circadian system. J Clin Invest. 8 February 2016. doi:10.1172/JCI82306.