Friday, 12 October 2012

Jetlag

As you navigate your way through life's pitfalls and indiscretions - blandishments to lovers, excuses to employers, diktats to children - it's worth familiarising yourself with the results of some of the more arcane psychological experiments to buttress your stance.  These are better deployed without citation as it's frequently easy for the opposition to unearth evidence proving the converse.  
My favourite concerns circadian rhythms.  In the freewheeling time before the advent of ethics committees, volunteers were isolated in a dark cave with no external stimulus to monitor their sleep habits and determine their natural day length.  Despite having inhabited the planet for thousands of years, it seems that humans are still not fully adapted to a 24 hour day as most people were found to be attuned to a 26 hour cycle.  This explains why, left to my own devices, I prefer to go to bed later and later each night, with a corresponding slippage in getting up time. While this explanation might mollify the parents of indolent teenagers, I've never found it cuts the mustard with apoplectic bosses.  However it may contribute to explaining why travelling west across time zones, which increases apparent day length, is generally less stressful than going east.    
My own formula for dealing with jet lag is simple.  When travelling regularly to New York, I'd aim for a late morning departure, typically BA175, which would deposit me in Manhattan by mid-afternoon.  Having checked in to my hotel and showered, I'd take a walk of at least an hour in daylight. Sunlight and exercise, apart from being tonics in their own right, are apparently the secret to resetting the metabolic clock.   A stroll through Central Park, a steak at Smith and Wollensky's and holding out for bed until at least 9pm would guarantee a good night's sleep and an early start the next morning with no excuse to circumvent the gym before work.  
Provided one could feign working on the outbound flight, sleeping was encouraged on the way home, but less from sympathy than the expectation that the itch of guilt would propel returning travellers straight to the London office after a quick shower in the arrivals lounge  But however much BA tricked out the cabin to resemble a hotel bedroom, I only ever slept fitfully.  In the certain knowledge that once we'd left the eastern seaboard the captain was busy flirting with the most pliant flight attendant, I never wavered from the belief that unless someone was monitoring the creaks and quivers of the aircraft it would surely plunge into the Atlantic.

© David Thompson 2012

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