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Staying Sharp When Crossing Time Zones

by Robert Moskowitz

It's the big trip: A tour of the international facilities of your company. If you're a novice at managing jet lag, here are some important tips for dealing with this annoying and debilitating phenomenon. By following a few simple suggestions, you can remain alert and mentally sharp before, during, and after a trip across multiple time zones.

• The problem of mental fatigue and fuzziness is not due simply to fatigue—although sleep deprivation is a contributing factor. It results mainly from disruption of the body's rhythms. This so-called "jet lag" can be eliminated or overcome in less than one day by adhering to a precise combination of diet control, light exercise, and timing sleep and social interactions. It also helps to drink plenty of non-alcoholic fluids to combat the body's normal dehydration in the dry atmosphere of airplanes.
• Normally, you're most alert during the daylight hours and ready for sleep at a certain time each night. But when you travel across several time zones, your sleeping/waking cycles almost always fall out of synchronization with local business hours. The problem is compounded by inadvertently napping, eating, exercising, or spending time outdoors at inappropriate times in the body's cycle. Giving the body the wrong cue as it's adjusting from one time zone to another can flip a six-hour time shift in the normal 24-hour cycle into an 18-hour time shift that takes many days to clear up.
• A typical anti-jet-lag regimen for a nine-hour time shift (a flight from, say, Los Angeles, CA, to Zurich, Switzerland) begins three or four days before departure. The traveler alternates one day of large meals with one day of smaller meals, but there's no disruption of working schedules or bedtimes. Breakfast and lunch should be high-protein meals, which helps to stimulate activity; supper should be high-carbohydrate, which helps to stimulate rest.
• The day of the flight is critical in smoothing the time-zone adjustment because large hops around the globe make a normal waking period much longer or shorter than usual. Traveling west to east, for example, the Los Angeles to Zurich traveler should wake early, begin functioning on Swiss time midway through the journey, and skip what would be supper in the body's normal daily cycle.
• The west-to-east traveler also tries to be active during morning hours—precisely the time when his body wants sack time. Staying outdoors during the day of arrival helps the body re-set its internal clock to the new schedule. On this trip, two calendar days go by while the body goes through only one and two-thirds of its normal daily cycles.
• Returning east to west, the same traveler skips lunch instead of supper, rests on the airplane during what the body thinks is mid-afternoon, and again gets plenty of bright light on the first day back home. Traveling from Zurich to Los Angeles, only two calendar days go by during two-and-a-third of the body's daily cycle.

And it really works. On a recent trip from Los Angeles to Zurich and on to Vienna, then back home by way of Venice and Milan, my family and I suffered absolutely no fuzzy-headedness, no inability to concentrate, and not even very much fatigue. None of the anti-jet-lag regimen (obtained from Jet-Ready Travel Services) interfered with our normal sleep, our ability to do useful work, or our enjoyment along the way.

While no one has calculated the annual cost of jet lag in terms of reduced productivity or lost business time, locals around the world report they are always happy to see severe symptoms of jet lag in the negotiator who has flown halfway around the world to hammer out an important business deal!