How To Deal With Jet Lag (We Underestimated It!)

Everyone knows when you travel through the time zones you’re at risk of getting jet lag, in fact, it’s highly likely. 

There’s tons of information across the internet on how to prevent it, but nobody ever really talks about what jet lag is, or how it can affect your first week (or two!) of travel.

It’s safe to say we underestimated jet lag on our first long haul trip but after multiple round the world flights, and several occasions of being rendered useless by it, we’re here to give you our best tips on how to prevent jet lag, and how to deal with it if it hits you hard.

How Long Does Jet Lag Last

The first time we flew from the UK to Australia, Dec got hit the hardest with Jet Lag and it took us almost two weeks to recover fully, to the point where we weren’t getting a bit tired by mid day or a bit forgetful. 

The second time we were better prepared, so it took us around 4-5 days to feel better.

Each time we’ve flown back from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, dealing with jet lag has been much easier and we’ve recovered much quicker.

The general rule for how long jet lag lasts is one day for every hour of time difference.

What Does Jet Lag Feel Like?

The effects of jet lag are different for everyone. I had extreme tiredness and hunger, Dec had headaches and asymmetric pupils! So with that in mind, here are some of the most common symptoms of jet lag;

• Tiredness
• Nausea
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Joint swelling
• Digestive issue.
• Impaired judgement and decision making
• Memory lapses
• Irritability & mood swings
• Sickness
• Flu like symptoms

How To Deal With Jet Lag

The biggest way to deal with jet lag, for us, was to simply expect the worst, don’t make plans for the first week of landing and take it easy. 

Now, of course not everyone has the ability to take the whole first week off of travelling to recover from jet lag. If that’s the case for you, here are some easy tips that don’t involve sleeping tablets. If you feel you might need medication, please see proper medical advice at your Drs or a clinic near your hotel when you land (hotels can usually help you with this!).

Since the majority of jet lag symptoms are caused by a sudden and dramatic change in your circadian rhythm, the more preparation you can do, the better!

Before The Flight

• Drink plenty of water. Proper hydration is the key to avoiding jet lag and having a comfortable flight.
• Try to adjust your sleep pattern slightly, even if it’s just going to bed or getting up half an hour earlier/later 
• Adjust your eating slightly, again, even if it’s just by an hour

During The Flight

• • Try and sleep when your destination is sleeping (this might mean delaying sleep before the flight to make it easier)

• Eat when your destination is eating. We’ve found most airlines help with this by having well thought out food delivery times.

• Drink plenty of bottled water… Avoid aeroplane coffee/tea. 

When You Land

• Get morning light as soon as you can. Forcing yourself up out of bed at a ‘normal’ time for your destination will help switch your internal clock over to the right time zone
• Eat something at normal meal times. The worst part for us was waking up and feeling hungry at weird times, but not hungry at all at breakfast. Forcing yourself to eat even just a handful of cereal in the morning will help you deal with jet lag
• If you need to nap… nap! Forcing our body to stay awake when it really needs to sleep, in our experience, made jet lag worse once we landed. Instead we scheduled in little – and I mean little – power naps and then extended the time out between them.

Our First Experience of Jet Lag

When we first moved to Australia, we were hit badly with jet lag. Well. Dec was, I wasn’t too bad and I can only put that down to my pre-flight preparations that perhaps got my body used to the idea of crossing several time zones to reach our destination. 

So when we landed in China, our first big timezone crossing from the UK, we felt great!

We were refreshed and spent the best part of our 14 hour layover in Guangzhou taking in the sights around the city, treating ourselves to a quick power nap before heading back to the airport for flight #2.

If you have a long layover during your long haul flights, making the most of the fresh air or using the time to adjust to your next time zone will help you greatly!

The First Day

It was quite early in the morning when we first landed in Australia, excitement took over the tiredness. As advised in every online guide about dealing with jet lag, we went about the first day as normal.

We successfully held off sleep until it reached our first night; we thought we were getting the hang of things. This was easy.

Then day 3 came around.

Nobody ever tells you that jet lag can be delayed.

Booy did we take a nosedive!

We were no longer able to get to sleep before 2 am, but neither could we sleep past 6 am! Running on 4 hours of sleep it felt like it was going to take forever to recover!

Google told us that on average it takes 1 day per time difference to fully recover from jet lag… that meant we would potentially have another 6 DAYS!! of feeling like this.

How did we miss that with all the research I’d done prior to flying?

Within the first week we (I say we… Dec suffered from this a lot worse than I did) experienced everything from a groggy head, lack of appetite (but also major munchies!?), feeling like the floor was moving and constant swelling in our joints – despite being really good with moving about on the plain.

The most surprising, and scary, side effect though was the difference in Dec’s pupils; every night for four days one would be really large whilst the other really small. Almost like he was imitating David Bowie.

As you can imagine we initially got really worried, but apparently it’s down to your body being so run down and tired that it doesn’t function normally, like it doesn’t really know what it wants/needs. Again, this is something we’d never seen mentioned in any of the guides we’d read.

The main advice given with jet lag is to fight it, sleep when you’re supposed to and try to stay awake when it’s daytime.

This didn’t work with us, it’s hard to force yourself awake when your body is physically shutting itself down to sleep by 1 pm.

The Break Through

Instead, we went with the flow; it wasn’t like we were only on a two-week holiday and needed to make the most of it.

If we needed to nap, we did; and each day we found we were lasting a little bit longer.

Eating proper meals at normal meal times was our big breakthrough though.

Once we started eating ‘breakfast food’ in the morning and a big meal in the evening; even if it meant waking ourselves up for it, it was like our bodies finally got the message and realised we were no longer on UK time.

It took about a week and a half, maybe two weeks, to be fully back to normal. It wasn’t pleasant but we got through it and amazingly we managed to get all our important things done whilst dealing with it. 

So if you have a big extended trip coming up and you’re curious about how the jet lag will affect you, all I can say is expect the worst and you’ll be ok.

We made the mistake of expecting to feel ‘just a little bit tired’ and instead, we suffered pretty badly.

How have you dealt with jetlag in the past? Did the ‘force it to be ok’ method work, or did you resort to going with the flow like us?