Jet Lag Symptoms and Recovery – The Shonky Version

Jet Lag is one of those First World Problems related to travel that people suffer when they decide to cross a few time zones to feed their travel addiction. It’s something I experience all the time because any flight out of Australia is always a long one, and almost always involves the change of a few time zones that sets your body clock upside down and inside out!

But I’d rather fly than drive long distances. Statistically speaking, you are approximately 740 times more likely to die in the car on the way to the airport than in a plane itself, so I’ll take the big metal machine with wings any day! It definitely beats encountering some of the worst drivers in the world!

For some reason, I find jet lag is worse for me if I travel from west to east than from east to west – it feels like I’ve had a hangover for a few days.

Unfortunately, no one has yet invented a teleport machine that will put the commercial aircraft constructors out of business, so it looks like the world will be stuck with the symptoms and side effects of jet lag for many years to come. It would be great if you could be teleported to South America for a few hours to take in a crazy football game, but be back in your home country in time for dinner!

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a list of silly potential jet lag coping mechanisms that might help your reduce the symptoms of this traveller’s disease. But they probably won’t work! Feel free to try these at your own risk!

Thanks to Southern Cross Travel Insurance for supporting this silly article!

Jet Lag – The Travel Tart’s theories on how to recover better from it’s symptoms!

1. When selecting your potential holiday destinations, choose places that are only directly south or directly north of where you live! Sure, this limits your choices, but hey, you won’t have jet lag!
2. But if for some reason you do want to venture to another country with a vastly different timezone to yours, do your very best to sweet talk your way into a business class seat. On the few times where I have been lucky enough to fly non-cattle class, I’ve found that being able to lie horizontally and catch some zzzz’s drastically reduces my jet lag when I get off the plane.
3. If your attempt to sweet talk yourself into business class fails, try and wear an offensive odour so that you will be left a four seat row to yourself so you can take a kip any time you want on your long haul flight!
4. Before going on your flight, load up your Mp3 playing device only with podcasts or recordings that only relate that something that bores you to death. Your brain will want to switch off and send you to sleep to save you from the pain!
5. Actually, this one works. Regardless of what time you arrive at your destination, stay up until 10pm the next night and then crash into a bed only after this time. The first day might be hard, especially if you arrive at 6am, but no pain, no gain!
6. Before boarding the plane, change the time on your watch to your destination so you get ‘into the timezone’, so to speak. Just make sure you don’t confuse am with pm!
7. Go to a place where the public transport is chaotic so this leaves you on edge all day, so you won’t feel like sleeping!
8. Instead of checking into a normal hotel or hostel at your destination and risking the chance of sleeping through your new waking hours, go to a love hotel first. I’m fairly sure no-one sleeps in there.
9. Before you fly back home, try and readjust your eating times accordingly. For example, if your breakfast is now dinner, have dinner and wash it down with a beer, even if it is 7 am (well, it’s always 5 o’clock in the world somewhere!), and finally
10. When you get back home, write down ‘I don’t have jet lag’ fifty thousand times, as if you were at school detention.

There you go. Some dubious tips on how to recover from jet lag. If any of them actually work, I’d be surprised, so let me know! Remember, if you’re lucky enough to experience the symptoms of jet lag, that means your in the top percentiles of the world’s richest people!

Unfortunately, jet lag isn’t covered under Southern Cross Travel Insurance (or any other insurance), but if it was, I’d be making a claim!