Travel and time zones
How to arrive ready to race when your body thinks it is 3am.
Travel & transitions
4 min read
Jet lag is not tiredness. It is your body keeping time for a city you have already left, and it will keep doing that for roughly a day per time zone unless you give it reasons to move.
The good news is that the reasons are simple and mostly free: light, food, and when you let yourself sleep.
The plan, in order
- Shift your clock two days before you fly. Thirty minutes a day toward the destination time is enough
- On the plane, set your watch to where you are going and eat and sleep on that schedule, not the cabin's
- Get outside in daylight within an hour of landing, even if it is the last thing you want
- Eat a proper meal at the destination's meal time, then stay up until a normal local bedtime
- For the first two days, keep caffeine before midday local time
A longer version, with a worked example for a New Zealand to Europe trip, is on the Sleep Health Foundation site.
If you are travelling with a team
The manager's portal has a welfare-on-tour checklist that covers sleep, meals and check-ins for the whole squad, so nobody has to hold this in their head alone.