Jet Lag – Understanding A Common Travel Blue

Do you feel disoriented, irritable, and fatigued as soon as you landed on the tarmac of another country? Will it result to swollen legs and eyes? This is such an inconvenience on your part. You are not going through this alone, though.

This is what you call a jet lag, your body’s reaction to the changing time zones. Jet lag may be made worse by aircraft conditions. As your body clock adjusts to the new time zone, jet lag lessens. You recover one day at time.

Main Cause of Jet Lag

Your body’s biological rhythms is regulated by your body clock. Let me state in a way simple enough for you to understand. Do you notice that you wake up at 6 AM without the alarm clock waking you up? Or go for a bathroom break at 8AM daily? Do you feel really hungry around 12 noon every day? Do you feel sleepy around 9 PM each day? That is you body clock in action. Just like an alarm clock, your body clock sends out reminders that you need to do something at a specified time.

Your country’s time zone dictates your body clock. Within your time zone, your body clock is conformed and adjusted to the local environment via external cues referred to as Zeitgerbers, the most important and the strongest of which is sunlight.

Now, when you travel across the world in an airliner, you cross different time zones quickly due to the fast speed of today’s jets. Since the journey around time zones is so fast, your body does not have plenty of time to adjust to the change. Your whole body clock becomes out of sync with all the destination’s time zone as it is exposed to a daylight and darkness pattern that’s different to the rhythms your whole body is used to. Therefore, your body’s natural structure is disrupted. The rhythms that influence the schedule for eating, resting, body’s temperature variance, and hormone regulation do not match the new surroundings. As a result, you feel the negative effects of an out-of-sync body clock.

Naturally, your body adjusts to the new time zone. How fast the adjustment is depends on the individual. You might be one of the few ones who experience very little, even hardly noticeable, disruptions. A friend travelling with you may require a number of days to adjust to the new schedule so he could enjoy his cheap holidays to Cyprus after the flight from mainland USA.

Thankfully, jet lag is temporary and there are lots of ways to help you feel better. Click this link, look for tips about easing up jet lag, and book the vacation of your dreams. After several journeys, you would be accustomed to that feeling.

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