A cure for jet lag? Contributing to research on the topic was more than enough reason to say “yes” to joining the Qantas London-to-Sydney direct flight, scheduled to touch down at noon on Friday, November 15, after about 19.5 hours in the air. Then in the lead-up to the trip, I kept pondering, can you ever wholly prevent jet lag?

“I don’t think there will ever be a cure for jet lag,” says Dr Oliver Rawashdeh, a lecturer in biomedical science at the University of Queensland. “But you can ameliorate the symptoms, and accelerate your body’s alignment with your destination’s time zone.”