Jet Lag

For those of you who have suffered from jet lag before what I am going to tell you will come as no surprise. Jet lag is no fun! It seems that our bodies have internal clocks that tell us when we need to be asleep and when we need to be awake, etc. When we travel and end up in a different time zone it messes up that internal clock so our bodies and brains get disoriented. It can cause several symptoms such as sleeplessness or disorientation.

I recall a trip to the Philippines a few years ago. My trip took longer than expected because of a lay-over in Hong Kong, and by the time I finally got to Manila I had been awake for about 1 1/2 days with no sleep. Surprisingly I didn't sleep a wink that night, or the next day. The next night I only slept for a couple of hours. It wasn't until the third night that I finally got a decent amount of sleep. What was astonishing is that I wasn't really tired. Their time is about 13 hours ahead of time here so the middle of the night there was the middle of the previous day here. Pretty confusing, and my body and mind thought so as well. I did soon get attuned to the new time and was fine, but jet lag can last for days, or even weeks. I was lucky. One rule of thumb for jet lag is that for every hour of time change, you will suffer 1 day of jet lag. If that rule had held up in my case I would have had jet lag for 2 weeks!