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Posted on the Huffington Post by Dane Steele Green
For all of you who can sleep on a plane, I can truly say YOU are special. For the rest of the population, this article is for you. That’s Steele-speak to say I am taking on jet lag.
The rule of thumb is that for every hour you are “off,” it takes one full day to recover, not a big deal if you are flying New York to Reno (five hours) but hell on Earth for the poor souls flying the non-stops from Dallas to Sydney (17 hours) or Dubai to Los Angeles (16.5 hours). If that sounds sobering, just keep in mind the now-defunct, 19-hour Singapore Airlines run between Newark and Changi Airports. Needless to say, there were, and are, a lot of sleep-deprived zombies out there.
For the frequent long-hauler, there is a veritable smorgasbord of rough-and-ready cures to hard-set the biological clock. First and foremost is melatonin. With nightfall, the brain produces melatonin to induce us to fall asleep. At dawn, the melatonin drops off and we wake up. But for all its wondrous design, a brain can fall into a melatonin rut depending on the time zone. Simply, a plane moves faster than our noodles can keep up, and the organ cannot right away absorb a 16-hour light/time difference. The thriving melatonin-based industry would probably be a sad shade of itself if it were not for jet lag.
But not everyone is thrilled at the idea of altering their brain chemistry. Some intrepid souls go the hard-but-quick route of simply staying awake for however long it takes. Others swear by staying hydrated on a plane, still others by food: the Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet, the brainwave of biologist Charles Ehret in the 1970s, advocated a 4-day feast-and-fast that claims to jury-rig our sleep schedules. A recent articlein Travel +Leisure extols the powers of cyrotherapy, whereby in three minutes your drowsiness is obliterated entirely — provided you can withstand being subjected to a -166 Fº environment…or find one.
And then there are those badly-informed folks that booze themselves into a stupor. Just ask your nearest flight attendant about how smooth an experienceit is to have a sloshed flier aboard, to say nothing of de-planing.
But in the end, all these tricks are just that — tricks. The brain, and the body, are not always so easily fooled. The crux of the situation is light. People westbound should get as much morning sunlight as they can at their destination, while eastbounders should avoid it (the latter of which is easy-peasy; just get yourself a good sleep mask and draw the curtains). However, timetables and schedules aren’t always so accommodating, particularly for business travelers who usually have meetings right after they land. This has led to travel-friendly innovations in “light therapy.”
Light therapy is nothing new; mental health professions regard it a stand-by for seasonal affective disorder (AKA, the winter blues) brought about by not enough exposure to sunlight. A land whose long winter nights are matched by their long summer days, Finland knows a little something about light and how an over- or under-abundance can throw a body out of whack. Finnish inventors at Valkee, in the northerly city of Oulu, earlier this year introduced the HumanCharger, a headset about the size of an iPod that beams two high-intensity rays of lights into your head through a pair of ear-buds that directly zaps the brain into wakefulness. As meta as that sounds, the April 2015 issue of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance raved about the technology after series of double-blind tests.
“This is the first ever randomized, placebo-controlled, and double-blinded light therapy study on alleviation of jet lag symptoms, and the results indicate that transcranial bright light given through ear canals decreases symptoms of jet lag,” Valkee Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Jari Karhu, MD, Ph.D., tells me.
“We are excited about the opportunity of alleviating jet lag symptoms of frequent business and holiday travelers alike, and look forward to further studies in the area.”
For all that technical jargon, at its most basic, light therapy works with the idea that the brain is not so beholden to the Sun that it can’t be fooled by the next best thing, say, an LED. More over, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve your eyes. The pocket-sized HumanCharger helps beat jet lag in by channeling beams of its UV-free, blue-enriched bright light directly into the cranium through the ear canal. The company claims just 12 minutes daily can half the effects of jet lag. That sounds much more practical than the standard regimen for light therapy: standing before large sunlamps. Go on, just try packing that.
So pick your poison, be it food, water, or something out of “Star Trek.” And for all those travelers sound asleep in their seats, trust me, it is taking all my moral and ethical strength not to kick the back of your seat.