How to outsmart jet lag

Plus: Why it's easier to stay healthy in Japan

View this email online August 13, 2023 by Andrea Muraskin This week: It’s August, and we’re squeezing the most out of summer like an orange in one of those big manual juicers you see at hotel buffets. For you, that could mean syncing your body up with a far-away destination with our jet lag tips, or taking advantage of the season’s fresh ingredients for a healthful Japanese-inspired meal at home. We’re also refreshing ourselves and our gut bacteria with trendy prebiotic drinks. Let's go.  Jet lag tips from NPR’s international correspondents, and a sleep researcher Jenny Kane/AP With just a few weeks left of summer, we want to help you make the most of your vacation. And nothing ruins a trip to the Louvre or a scuba-diving excursion like your body telling you it’s time for bed NOW.  So can you “hack” jet lag, so to speak? Or at least mitigate it? We posed the question to NPR’s International Desk and got an array of helpful answers from our globetrotting staff.  For instance, NPR producer Greg Dixon is enthusiastic about an app for jet lag called Time Shifter. “You input your travel schedule and it spits out a plan for a couple days before and a couple days after your flights, advising you when to get/avoid natural light, drink coffee, take melatonin, etc,” Greg writes. “It has worked really, really well.”  For a scientific take, I called up David Stevens, a physiologist from Adelaide, Australia. Stevens co-authored a consensus statement about managing jet lag and travel fatigue for athletes in the journal Sports Medicine, while working at the sleep institute at Flinders University. (Research on jet lag is limited, and most of it has been done on athletes, who are expected to zip across time zones and win trophies).  Stevens offered up a few guiding principles. First off, understand the workings of your body’s circadian rhythms, that is, our internal clock that tells us when it’s time to fall asleep and when to wake up. Then you can take advantage of what sleep researchers call zeitgebers or time-givers, external factors that set the pace of these rhythms. Light is the most important one but exercise, meals and even social cues can also trigger sleepiness or wakefulness.  Get a head start Whether you use an app or not, Stevens suggests starting your time zone adjustment a few days before your trip begins. “One of your best strategies to prepare for any westward travel is you just go to sleep, for example, an hour later each night,” Stevens says. And go ahead and allow yourself to stay in bed an hour later each morning as well.  Things get tougher when you’re heading eastward. “It’s brutal from west to east.  It usually takes me 10 days to adjust, say from Washington to Tokyo,” writes NPR’s Asia editor Vincent Ni.  Stevens says there’s a simple explanation for this. Going to bed later than normal – as you do when traveling westward – is relatively easy for our body clocks to understand, because you get more tired in the evening. “My body's going, hang on, you're meant to be asleep now, why aren't you asleep?” he says. But when you travel eastward, you have to try to go to sleep when you’re not yet tired, and that’s just… confusing to your circadian clock, Stevens says. “The body's going, hang on, you're not meant to be asleep yet. What are you doing?” And to make matters worse, one of the body’s peak performance times, when we’re naturally most alert, is around 7 p.m., he adds.  So in these cases, Stevens says, prep a few days before your trip by going to sleep earlier than normal and getting up early to take in lots of morning light.  Onboard sleep tricks and aids Stevens says it’s a good idea to sleep on the flight if you can, though the consensus statement notes it’s best to align your sleep with what would be night in your city of departure, so dozing off comes more naturally. That can mean a nighttime flight is a good choice.  Of course falling asleep in a tight plane seat (short of upgrading to business class) can be nearly impossible for some of us. NPR’s Vincent Ni, however, has onboard shuteye down to a science: “I fill my rucksack with solid but soft material, put it on the tray (in economy class) and lay my forehead on it. Key for me is the eyeshade and ear plugs.”   Now as you might expect for a group of travel-hardened foreign correspondents, several International Desk members reported using substances not naturally found in the body. “If I need to try to sleep on the flight (and it’s not super early in the morning – I’m not that bad) then I find a glass of wine or two is my sleep aid!” writes Beirut-based correspondent Ruth Sherlock. Others mentioned taking prescription sedatives like zolpidem (Ambien) to nod off.  Stevens recommends against prescription sedatives because “it’s not really a physiological sleep,” and you can develop a dependency.  As for alcohol, Stevens says the short answer is “no” – it can disrupt sleep. Although he confesses on a recent trip to London that he “may have had a pint as soon as I landed, but that was at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon,” In other words, a good 6 hours before bedtime.  Once you land: Manage your light intake If willing yourself into slumber before the sun goes down isn’t working out for you, that’s no surprise, says Stevens. That’s because light is the most important of the zeitgebers or time-givers. “When light hits your retina, the signals travel through the brain, it goes to the hypothalamus,” which controls melatonin secretion, Stevens says. Melatonin is what makes you feel sleepy, and secretion doesn’t start until daylight starts to dim at the end of the day.    Conversely, exposing yourself to daylight early in the day can be a great way to help sync your circadian clock to the new schedule. “In order to let my body adjust more quickly, I typically spend a lot of time outside in the full sunlight if I can (in warmer months) or in the sunlight inside (in colder months) to remind my body of the new surroundings and to let the melatonin flow,” writes Central Europe correspondent Rob Schmitz.  Stevens says taking a melatonin tablet before bed, coupled with daylight exposure, can also be a great way to adapt to a new time zone. And don’t forget to shut off that blue light on your phone, too.  Naps, meals and exercise  NPR’s deputy international editor Nishant Dahiya  and China correspondent John Ruwitch both swear by staying awake until 9 p.m. at your destination – no matter how cruddy you feel – and Stevens says that’s a good rule of thumb.  In answer to my anxious plea “Are naps allowed?!” Stevens says they can be beneficial. “Naps can give you the little perk of energy that you need to then last an extra couple of hours.” The catch? He recommends capping your snooze at 20 minutes.   Dahiya also relies on “more than three espresso shots the next morning” to help power through sleeplessness. Stevens warns if you do make use of caffeine, to make sure you drink it at least 6 hours before you plan to hit the hay.  Rather than chemical help, Stevens recommends tapping into other zeitgebers – including food intake, exercise, and temperature changes to adjust to a different time zone. “Every cell in our body also seems to follow a circadian pattern,” he says. So for example “If you exercise at a particular time of day, and then you shift when you exercise,” in your new time zone that can be a circadian cue, he says. So can shifting your meal times.  “My favorite sleep aid is to go for a walk,” Stevens says. “Even if it's just for an hour, even if it's at night, I find going for a walk, getting a bit of fresh air, that just sort of clears your head,” he says.  Happy travels, and do let us know if any of these tips work for you. Get in touch at shots@npr.org, and we may include your tip in a future newsletter.  Plus: Perceiving without seeing: How light resets your internal clock   Newsletter continues after sponsor message What the U.S. could learn from Japan about making healthy living easier Yuki Noguchi/NPR Around 43% of the U.S. population is currently considered obese — nearly 10 times Japan's rate of 4.5%. NPR science correspondent Yuki Noguchi says that’s not because Japanese people love to eat any less than Americans do. Visiting her parents’ homeland this summer, she marveled at the quantity and variety of food available everywhere from train platforms to department store basements. But Noguchi has learned it’s easier to make healthy food choices in Japan than it is in the United States – and to exercise, too.  Terry Huang, a health policy professor at the City University of New York, says a healthier lifestyle is built into the fabric of life in Japan. For example, kids’ school lunches are made from scratch and free for all. And residents of Japan’s densely populated and safe cities rely heavily on public transit – which amounts to more walking throughout the day.  It’s true – Japanese and other Asian food cultures place an emphasis on longevity and health rather than convenience – the kind of cultural realities that are slow to take hold in a new place. But could the United States learn from Japan’s example? In between car trips to the grocery store and chopping fresh vegetables to feed two teenage sons in suburban DC, Yuki reflects.  Plus: People in Tokyo wait in line 3 hours for a taste of these Japanese rice balls Car Talk archives now available on NPR+! With NPR+, your recurring donation through plus.npr.org can unlock sponsor-free listening, early access, and even bonus episodes for popular NPR podcasts like Fresh Air, Planet Money, The NPR Politics Podcast, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and now the Car Talk archives too! Now's a great time to support your station and enjoy NPR+ as a reward. Get NPR+ Prebiotic sodas promise to boost your gut health. Here's what to eat instead Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Poppi If a food or drink or supplement is advertised as prebiotic, that means it contains food that the beneficial bacteria in your gut like to eat. And a new crop of adorably-marketed fizzy drinks like Olipop offer your gut bacteria food in the form of fiber.  It’s appealing to think we can drink our fiber, but does it work? Some of the experts senior health editor Maria Godoy interviewed for this story proudly call themselves “fiber nerds” or “fiber fanatics.” That’s because the impact fiber can have on your overall health is pretty profound. “Heart disease, autoimmune disease, cancer, metabolic syndrome, neurodegenerative disease, inflammatory bowel disease ... anything having to do with the immune system, it's all impacted by gut microbes,” says Justin Sonnenburg, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. (Mental health too). And most Americans don’t get enough in our diets.  And the scientific fiber-enthusiast community, they recommend that you – you guessed it – prioritize eating lots of fruits and veggies, especially ones high in fiber, like celery, avocados and blackberries rather than count on fiber-pop. A fibrous favor of mine are sunchokes/Jerusalem artichokes. Though they can be hard to find, they’re delicious roasted and taste like something between an apple and a potato. Nuts and whole grains can help boost your fiber intake too. Feed your brain and your microbes: read Maria’s article now. Also: Looking for a probiotic for gut health? Try an apple   As a writer slowly loses his sight, he embraces other kinds of perception Gregory Halpern/Penguin Random House While listening on my headphones to author Andrew Leland speak with Terry Gross about losing his vision, I walked down a long block and crossed a busy road – four lanes of traffic – to get to an urban pond. As I strolled past runners and ducks, never hitting pause, I realized that walking through a city while listening to a podcast is a privilege of the sighted.  Leland, who has a progressive eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, described learning how to cross the street at a training program for the blind: “It's almost like balancing a stereo. Like you listen to the traffic crossing in front of you and you want to make sure that you can hear the car beginning to approach in your left ear. And then it sort of exits through your right ear and the tip of your nose has to be sort of finely balanced.” (While hearing has become more important, Leland says the idea that your hearing gets sharper when your vision diminishes is a myth.)  In his new memoir, The Country of the Blind, Leland explores many of the social aspects of his vision loss: including new feelings of vulnerability when using a cane in public, the effects of his disability on his marriage, and mixed feelings about becoming part of a blind community. And he also calls attention to technologies that make the transition easier, like screen readers. Read highlights of Leland’s Fresh Air interview, or listen to the full conversation. Plus: A gene-editing experiment let these patients with vision loss see color again We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism on Shots. Yours in any time zone, Andrea Muraskin and your NPR Health editors Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WMFE (edit station). What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: shots@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Goats & Soda, Up First, Life Kit and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Health emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy