Make the most of your trip by beating jet lag once and for all.
If you've ever travelled more than a few timezones in a few hours, you'll know that jet lag is terrible.
Waking up in the middle of the night and feeling sleepy and hungry at the wrong times can be all sorts of annoying when all you want to do is explore a new city, or have to be on top form during a work trip.
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It happens because your body's internal clock gets all out of sync.
Every cell in your body has its own circadian clock, and they're all regulated by a central one called the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus region of your brain. When you skip time zones, it sends these little clocks out of whack.
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The good news is external signals help regulate your internal clock, and you can use that to your advantage.
Your hypothalamus judges what time it is by the signals your body sends it, which is mostly based on light, but also when you eat.
Here are some things you can do to help your body adjust and get over jet lag as quickly as possible.
Start to shift your body clock before you go anywhere.
Professor Richard Wiseman, author of Night School (Macmillan, 2014), recommends making use of the days before you travel.
There's some evidence that starting to get up earlier in the few days before traveling east can alleviate some of the horrible fuzziness jet lag brings. A study of 28 people in the Journal of Biological Rhythms found that bringing sleep forward an hour a day for three days and exposing participants to bright light in the morning meant they could advance their sleep pattern without losing out on alertness.
If you're going west instead of east, you need to delay your sleep pattern, to try sleeping in an hour later per day for the three days before you travel.
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