Maintain your rhythm and do good business

HITTING the ground running after a 14-hour flight from Sydney to LA is a tough ask, especially with the 17-hour time difference.

Hi-tech help is at hand for sufferers of jet lag

HITTING the ground running on a business trip after a 14-hour trans-Pacific flight from Sydney to LA is a tough ask, especially with the 17-hour (effectively seven-hour) time difference. Returning to Australia just three days later and functioning coherently is even more challenging.

Yet many business trips to the US, Britain or Europe include these challenges. Jet lag adds to the health burden of reviving after 14-plus hours confinement in an aeroplane seat. It is indeed horrible to nod off during the day when you can’t afford to.

This reporter tries to wake up really early and go to bed at about 7pm to help pre-adjust to US west coast time. I never plan to sleep during the day on arrival and enjoy a long walk to get exhausted at my destination before sleeping at their regular time.

Getting sleep on the plane, moderating eating, using noise cancelling headphones and even apps that produce white noise such as extreme rain can help. There are apps such as White Noise and White Noise Lite (for iOS, OS X, Android and Windows). Of course, having a bed in business class helps.

There are also jet lag apps that calculate the times you should sleep and expose yourself to light and darkness in the lead-up to travelling. One indicates the times at which you should pop mela­tonin in the quest to readjust your body’s circadian rhythm.

The iOS app Entrain, developed at the University of Michigan, uses your past “lighting history” and mathematical modelling to timetable light changes before you go. It’s just been up­graded to version 2.

You enter your normal wake-up time, bed time and time zone, and details of your trip. I could tell it, say, that I am heading to LA in four days. Entrain produces a four-day schedule with “light on” and “light off” times that you can simulate with lamps.

The obvious limitation is that most of us work in the real world and cannot orchestrate lights going off in the middle of the day and on in the wee hours. On ­Entrain’s schedule, it would be lights on at 3.36am and darkness at 4.48pm. By the time of the flight, I’d be switching lighting on at 10.20pm, and orchestrating darkness at 12.48pm.

That’s totally impractical for me but might be possible if you work from home. Should you miss your light on/off time, Entrain can adjust the schedule. It’s an Apple- only app, but an Android version is in the works.

There are plenty of alternatives. The Jet Lag app ($3.79, iOS) by Ozomedia seeks to calculate the best times for you to sleep, to seek and avoid light and adds prompts to take jet lag medication, if you have it.

Times can be added to your personal calendar. The app also distinguishes between long and short-stay trips, so you can manage your sleep across multiple destinations and time zones.

Jet Lag Rooster (free, iOS and Android) by the Swan Medical group schedules sleeping times, and times to seek light, and will prompt you to take 0.5 mg doses of melatonin. StopJetLag, Jet Lag Calculator, Jet-Lag Rescue and JetLag Genie are alternatives.

Apps are just one way to tackle jet lag among a sea of ideas that include fasting and diets such as the Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet, which says you should start eating breakfast at destination breakfast time.