Editor’s note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published on February 23, 2017.
Jet lag, also known as flight fatigue, time zone change syndrome or asynchrony, occurs when traveling across time zones disrupts your body’s internal clock, causing mental, emotional and physical symptoms such as:1,2
- Drowsiness and somnolence during the day, followed by insomnia at night
- Anxiety, irritability, confusion, and difficulty concentrating
- constipation or diarrhea
- Headache, nausea, indigestion, dehydration, and/or general discomfort
The mental effects of jet lag are fairly well established, but research shows that jet lag can also have a significant impact on your physical performance—a finding that’s especially important for athletes traveling to games and competitions.
Jet lag affects physical performance
By looking at data from more than 40,000 Major League Baseball games over 20 years, including players’ travel arrangements, researchers found that there are “subtle but perceptible” differences when players travel across one or two time zones for a game. Influence.3,4 According to Time magazine:5
“For example, teams from Eastern states that have just returned from playing in the West tend to have fewer stolen bases, doubles, and triples and receive more double plays than teams that have not traveled recently. …..
These effects are enough to eliminate a team’s home field advantage… The effects of traveling from west to east are stronger than those of traveling from east to west, supporting the argument that they are caused by the body’s biological clock and not just Was it time on the plane or general scheduling issues…”
Dr. Ravi Arada, associate director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern University, said the reason for the decline in body function is likely due to the fact that muscle cells are closely related to the circadian clock.
Therefore, “it makes sense that one might see impaired muscle activity or muscle efficiency due to this misalignment,” he said.
Helpful tips for reducing jet lag
Generally speaking, your body adapts to time zone changes at a rate of one time zone per day. To prevent any loss of athleticism due to jet lag, Allada suggested that baseball teams might want to make sure their starting pitchers are on site a day or two early if they need to travel cross-country.
This will allow their internal body clock to adjust to their local time zone, allowing them to perform at their best. Other athletes would be wise to follow the same advice—especially if you travel east, which tends to desynchronize your body clock more than traveling west.
If you can’t squeeze in an extra day or two, you can pretend to be in your destination time zone at home.6
This advice may be particularly useful if you are traveling with young people. It’s hard to rest and recuperate when you arrive at your destination at 4 a.m. with one or more bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kids heading out the door.7
To do this, simply wake up and go to bed based on your destination time rather than your local time. In the morning, be sure to expose yourself to bright, full-spectrum light. If the sun hasn’t risen yet, use clear incandescent bulbs and cool blue spectrum LEDs to turn off melatonin production.
For example, if you’re flying from New York to Paris, go to bed an hour earlier each day for three days before your flight, and avoid bright light two to three hours before bed.
This may require closing blinds or curtains and turning off all lights and electronic screens. Avoid stimulants like caffeine and nicotine. When you wake up, be sure to get some bright sunlight.
If it’s still dark outside, use a light box or the artificial light combination above. Also make sure to change your meal times accordingly.
If you’re traveling at night, wear blue light-blocking glasses on the plane and keep them on until you go to bed. Excess blue light without a balance of red and near-infrared light can seriously impair your melatonin production.
Once you arrive at your destination, it’s best to get close to sunrise and then step outside to look in the direction of the sun. You can do this safely about an hour after sunrise. This will help reset your melatonin production. Weather and environment permitting, it’s best to do it outdoors with bare feet on the ground.
The effects of chronic jet lag can be severe
Other studies have investigated the health effects of jet lag by focusing on airline professionals such as pilots and flight attendants, who end up battling jet lag over time.8 Population-based studies have found that crew members have higher rates of cancer than the general population, including melanoma and breast and prostate cancers.
While cosmic radiation exposure is thought to be a factor that increases this risk, circadian rhythm disruption also plays a role. Animal studies have confirmed that mice suffering from chronic jet lag do have a higher chance of developing breast cancer than non-jet lag control mice.
Chronic jet lag also appears to accelerate cognitive decline—an effect linked to elevated cortisol levels.
One study found that long-haul flight crews had higher cortisol levels than ground crew members, while flight crews with the longest tenure scored lower on memory tests than crews with shorter tenures.
Inconsistent sleep habits may have similar effects
It’s worth noting that you don’t have to go anywhere to experience the effects of jet lag. A very similar situation can occur if you stay up late and sleep in on the weekend and then have to get up early on Monday morning.
If you have something important happening that day, such as a sports competition, written test, or presentation, your performance may suffer. The same goes for people who work the night shift. If you have no choice, the following tips can help you minimize your health risks:
• When you wake up at night, get some blue light exposure as this will help wake you up. I recommend combining traditional clear incandescent bulbs with bright cool white (blue rich) LED bulbs.
You need both, not one or the other, as LEDs will give you blue, while incandescents provide a balanced red and near-infrared light spectrum.
Ideally, start using incandescent lights as soon as you wake up to simulate sunrise. After about half an hour, add LED lights to simulate the sun rising at noon. Using LED lights for 15 to 30 minutes will help you establish your new circadian rhythm.
Once you feel the photon energy build up, you can stop using the LED, as too much can do more harm than good. (Blue LED light can produce excess free radicals if red and near-infrared light are not adequately balanced.)
• Thereafter, avoid further exposure to blue light. This means using only incandescent light bulbs at home and at work. Or, wear blue light-blocking glasses to avoid additional exposure to LED or fluorescent bulbs.
These strategies are better than nothing, but be aware that by working at night, you’re depriving yourself of natural sunlight, which is a very important component of good health. Sunlight is not only a catalyst for the production of vitamin D in the skin, but also plays an important role in mitochondrial health, bioenergy production, and is important for healthy vision.
What about using melatonin?
Your master circadian clock is located in the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is part of the hypothalamus. Based on light and dark signals, the suprachiasmatic nucleus tells the pineal gland when to secrete melatonin and when to turn off melatonin. When traveling across time zones, melatonin is often recommended to help reset your body clock.
According to government surveys, 3.1 million Americans report using melatonin supplements to relieve jet lag and insomnia. However, it’s important to realize what you’re really doing here. Melatonin is more than a simple “sleep hormone,” it’s a biomarker of darkness. Exposing yourself to bright light regularly and taking only melatonin is not advisable. According to the Guardian:9
“Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who originally patented synthetic melatonin as a sleep aid in 1995, reported that the ideal dose was 0.3 mg to 1 mg, and suggested that higher doses might be used over the long term. It changes the body’s response to melatonin, the hormone, and may disrupt sleep.”
That said, if you’re traveling or working the night shift, it can definitely help reset your internal clock.10 According to a 2002 Cochrane repository review,11 People who traveled across five or more time zones and took melatonin near bedtime at their destination experienced less jet lag symptoms compared to placebo.
The greatest benefits were reported by people who traveled eastward, who crossed the most time zones, and who took doses closer to 5 milligrams (much higher than what is typically recommended). People with epilepsy and those taking warfarin (a blood thinner) need to be aware that they are at increased risk for harmful side effects when taking melatonin supplements.
Optimal health depends on optimal sleep
Keep in mind that when your circadian rhythm is disrupted, your body produces less melatonin, which means its ability to fight cancer is reduced and its protection against free radicals that can accelerate aging and disease is reduced. will weaken. Suffering from jet lag due to occasional travel won’t have any major long-term effects, but it will certainly worsen your mental and physical functioning over the next day or two.
If you want to perform at your best, mentally or physically, it’s wise to take steps to resynchronize your body clock with the local time at your destination, or give yourself a few extra days to readjust, either at home Change your wake-up and sleep schedule.
If you are chronically jet-lagged, whether from shift work or frequent travel across time zones, you can minimize your health risks by artificially creating exposure to light and dark—bright light when you should be awake, bright light when you are It should be dark when awake.Probably asleep