It’s not just been the pandemic or my (almost) year-long illness.  No, it’s been the TSA and the airlines who have destroyed air travel.  Getting to the airport 2 hours early to twiddle one’s thumbs waiting for a plane that is way too often delayed, seats that have shrunk in size and stuffed together in narrower aisles- with terrible service to boot.

Yeah, that makes it really tough for me to want to fly.

The good thing is that many folks who haven’t traveled 250,000 miles a year for decades still think that airline travel is glamorous.   So, for at least a year or two, we can convince them to visit our clients, collect data, and the like on our behalf.  (The trick is also to limit their annual travel to about 100,000 miles a year or less.)

But, these folks also haven’t learned the tricks of travel.  In particular, how to deal with jet lag.  It’s what we feel when we cross at least two time zones in a relatively rapid fashion.  Basically, it’s because our internal clock (circadian rhythm) is out of sync to the locality in which we find ourselves situated.

I’ve written this phenomenon before, but since I just shared some advice with my travelers, I thought I’d share the same with you.

First you should know that traveling west is the least problematic in developing jet lag.  Except,  you do have to then travel east to return.  (Which is when it becomes worse.)  But, traveling to Europe or the Middle East (traveling east) means adjusting to those destinations in difficult.  (Coming home is more of a breeze.)  (My method, discussed further down the page, accommodates these facts.)

Traveling north or south doesn’t really traverse a time zone, so jet lag is, at best, minimal for this sort of travel.

But, when experiencing jet lag, some folks find deep-breathing techniques work.  Basically, this process changes our typical breathing from short, shallow swallows into much deeper inhalations.   The first trick is to find a comfortable position- lying or sitting, whatever floats your boat.  And, then we breathe in very slowly through our nose, filling our abdomen with air.  And, we have a hand on our belly, so we can feel it rise.  (The other hand is on our chest.) When we blow out through our nose (thinking we are also releasing the tension in our bodies), we should feel our hand fall lower than the one on our chest.  The same applies as we repeat the slow breath in.  This gets repeated about 5 times.

To be honest, that never worked for me.  Mostly because I can’t really breathe in or out through my nostrils.  Between two deviated septa and COPD, this would be an exercise in futility.

Exercise also helps.  The goal is to raise one’s heart rate, engaging our glutes, quads, calves, and hamstrings. My problem with this is that it takes several days of repetition- and 45 minutes a day to boot.  I didn’t really have that time when I traveled, since I crammed so many activities into my day (to minimize the number of days I engaged in travel).

If my travel was domestic, I kept operating as if I was in my normal time zone.  Yes, when I was in California, I woke up in the dead of night, writing my reports while it was still dark.  And, I ate dinner as if I lived in Florida (you know the 4:30 or 5:30 regimen).  And, went to sleep relatively early (at least early for me.)

This didn’t work for overseas travel, when my time zone was 6, 7, or even 11 hours off.    This was when I had to rely on melatonin at the right time to counteract symptoms of jet lag.

Pycnogenol is another (natural) drug.  Taken when one wants to drift off to sleep seems to cut the effects of jet lag down dramatically.  The trick is to limit one’s use of pycnogenol to under a week- to minimize feelings of dizziness, headaches, bowel issues- and even mouth ulcers.

I also switched my wine drinking for water.  That solved two issues- wine (and other alcoholic beverages) amplify feelings of jet lag.  While water tends to mitigate the symptoms.  So, switching water for wine gave me the benefit of both changes.

Hope that helps you, too.  My folks find it does.  (Even though they miss wine with their dinners.)