Jet lag is like the common cold. There are many cures offered but none are widely believed to work. There is no penicillin in the world of circadian rhythm misalignment. Sober health professionals will simply tell you to stay hydrated, try to rest and it’ll resolve itself.

Yet remedies for jet lag are as abundant as they are for colds. There are advocates for homeopathic cures. Light therapies. Hormone tweaking by direct ingestion (e.g. melatonin). Hormone tweaking my meal timing. Anything to help wrench your body onto its new schedule faster and eliminate that zombie feeling.

The longer you travel, the less this really matters. 2 days of jet lag in a 4 day business trip is torment. 2 days out of 4 months? Not a big deal. Still, I think it’s worth trying things to see if there’s any way to make my first few days in Bangkok easier.

Thus the experiment: Can I reduce or eliminate my jet lag symptoms on my trip from Seattle (PST, UTC-8) to Bangkok (UTC+7), a 15 hour time difference?

Options

Melatonin

Melatonin is a commonly recommended remedy for jet lag. And there seems to be real evidence for it:

MAIN RESULT: Nine of the ten trials found that melatonin, taken close to the target bedtime at the destination (10pm to > midnight), decreased jet-lag from flights crossing five or more time zones.

— Melatonin for the prevention and treatment of jet lag Herxheimer A1, Petrie KJ.

Melatonin is used to signal the onset of sleep. It rises after dark — not just after the clock says it’s night, but after the eyes say so too — and stays elevated all night long. It makes you feel groggy and sleepy. When you change timezones, it gets released at an inappropriate time, preventing sleep at night or making you sleepy during the day.

I’m using the Amazon-recommended melatonin supplement, Jetfighter Sleep.

No Jet Lag

No Jet Lag is a homeopathic cure from New Zealand. I suppose Kiwis would be more interested than other people in jet lag cures, living a plane ride from most other populated places as they do. I don’t believe in homeopathy, but it came recommended by M, so I planned on giving it a shot.

Unsurprisingly, the No Jet Lag people disagree with the Melatonin crew. I wonder what the ‘high dose vitamin C’ folks have to say about it?

Unfortunately, it seems I misplaced it on the final pack. Maybe it’ll turn up, or maybe it’s fighting jet lag from a storage unit in Seattle.

Eyes and Skin

Light is crucial to the regulation of daily rhythms. Both light on the skin and entering the eyes (incidentally, this is why I use the wonderful f.lux to remove the blue tones from my computers in the evening; helps you get better sleep) and light on the skin. So I’ll try to avoid bright lights at my new night time and get plenty of light my first day.

In fact, the CDC recommends it too:

Optimize exposure to sunlight after arrival from either direction. Exposure to bright light in the morning

moves the stage of circadian rhythm forward, while exposure to light in the evening delays the stage and

encourages later sleep.

— Jet Lag Lisa Libassi, Emad A. Yanni

Food!

One of the more recent jet lag treatments involves timing your meals. There are two themes to this:

Don’t eat from the last breakfast in your old timezone to the first breakfast time in your new timezone. And that breakfast should be pretty carb-free: think eggs and bacon, no toast. This a fast followed by a large protein and fat rich meal at your new destination
A gradual shift of your eating patterns before you leave so they mesh seamlessly with the destination. For me this would have meant flipping over the day/night meal schedule over the course of many days prior to leaving.

I’m a fan of fasting. It’s normal and healthy to let the body take a rest from digestion. There are evidently metabolic maintenance pathways which only get turned on during a fast of 18 hours in duration or more. I’ve done day fasts and intermittent fasts. I typically don’t have a breakfast until 11 or later. More than any equivocal research or propaganda, fasting feels right for my body.

So that’s the flavor of jet lag prevention I prefer.

Plan

My plan was to follow this schedule, using mostly a fast-based approach with the added drugs.

Here’s the timeline:

Execution

Look, I’m not made of stone. How can one continue to fast when one sees this?

I love sushi. This is my first time in Japan. I’m only here for 2 hours. Besides, it’s not the worst thing in the world for my jet lag experiment: a carb-rich insulinogenic meal like sushi works fine as an evening meal, and it’s close to dinner time in the target timezone. Plus, it was pretty good. Not awesome — this is an airport after all — but very solid sushi I’d’ve been happy to eat in a Seattle restaurant.

I should also note that I had a bit of sleep on the Japan/Thailand leg. It’s always hard for me to tell how much is actual sleep and how much is just conscious dozing.

Results

On the morning of the 4th, the day after the trip, I feel great. Like normal. Enough to write this post, plan my day to Wat Pho, and generally feel like exploring with gusto.

Evening of the 4th — 24 hours in Bangkok: as of bedtime on the 4th, I’m still feeling no after effects of the trip. I’m tired of course, but I walked pretty much the whole day — 11 miles according to my phone.

Morning of the 5th — 36 hours in Bangkok: Good night of sleep, waking refreshed. I do believe there was been no significant jet lag.

Success Kid

Nerd-pendix

Here’s the fun Python code I wrote to figure out those timezones. Naturally it took me twice as long as just looking it up online, but ya gotta be you.

print(' '.join(pytz.country_timezones('JP')))
print(' '.join(pytz.country_timezones('TH')))

pacific = pytz.timezone("US/Pacific")
japan = pytz.timezone("Asia/Tokyo")
# neither of these work; they give insane timezone offsets of +7:44 and +7:17
thailand = pytz.timezone("Asia/Bangkok")
thailand = pytz.timezone("Asia/Jakarta")
thailand = pytz.timezone("Asia/Phnom_Penh")
utc = pytz.timezone("UTC")

times = [ ['Wakeup in Seattle', datetime.datetime(2014,12,2,6,0,0,0, pacific)] ,
          ['Takeoff Seattle', datetime.datetime(2014,12,2,12,0,0,0, pacific)],
          ['Breakfast', datetime.datetime(2014,12,2,13,0,0,0, pacific)],
          ['Sushi Dinner at Narita', datetime.datetime(2014,12,3,17,30,0,0, japan)],
          ['Breakfast in Bangkok', datetime.datetime(2014,12,4,9,0,0,0, thailand)]
]

for t in times:
    print("|%s <br/> %s <br/> %s <br/> %s|%s|"%((t[1]).astimezone(utc).strftime("%b %d %H:%M (UTC)"),
                          (t[1]).astimezone(pacific).strftime("%b %d %H:%M (PST)"),
                          (t[1]).astimezone(japan).strftime("%b %d %H:%M (JST)"),
                          (t[1]).astimezone(thailand).strftime("%b %d %H:%M (THA)"),
                          t[0] ))