Travel & Hotspots

NEVER AGAIN a JETLAG

Good morning – at least I believe it’s morning, let’s just say it’s morning somewhere on this planet right now. I just came from Los Angeles and my whole system is a bit off. Nine hours of time difference, poppoppop. Now it could be worse; I once was in New Zealand and that was eleven hours different from home, and then I was really confused. Because we lived almost half a day earlier, I thought I knew everything half a day earlier than the rest of the world – time travel, it does strange things to my brain.

Now I regularly fly to America for work (and also pleasure), so over the years I’ve developed my own method to deal with the grogginess of the mind and the lethargy of the body. Warning: my method often goes directly against the views of experts. But I am naturally stubborn and have been a hopeless insomniac since birth (we’ll talk about that another time). My philosophy: every hour of sleep counts.

*Experts say: try to get into the rhythm of your destination a few days in advance. You adjust your biological clock with bright light or by darkening your home, by taking melatonin and exercising (exercise, ugh). I should have done this before I flew to America, according to an article in the Volkskrant: ‘In bright light and melatonin you prepare as if it’s three o’clock in the morning in the country of departure, and you do intensive physical exercise when it’s ’home‘ between one and five o’clock in the morning.’ Okay, so I should have been getting up at night a few days before I went to LA to put a bright lamp in my face, take melatonin, and exercise? Who does that?! And how, if you work during the day? Now I’m usually busy packing my bags deep into the night and all that stress, so maybe that counts as exercising in bright light? I say: sleep as much as you can, then you’ll be well-rested when you have to go to Schiphol.

*Experts say: don’t drink alcohol on the plane. I say: drink ALCOHOL on the plane. Because I want to sleep as much as possible, so even if I’m flying at ten in the morning, somewhere on the planet it’s five in the afternoon, bring on that nice little bottle of red wine. Then I’ll fall asleep during the first movie.

*Experts say: expose yourself to as much daylight as possible when you arrive. I say: okay… I believe in that. I immediately lay by the pool in the sun after arriving in LA purely for this therapeutic reason. It had to be done.

So that was the outbound journey. For the return journey, the main rule when you get home is: stay awake and go to bed at your normal time to get back into your regular rhythm as quickly as possible. I’ve tried that for years: not going to bed when I returned from New York or Los Angeles in the morning, broken from a night of missed sleep. And then fighting against jetlag for a week or longer. Until a few years ago I thought: forget it, I’m going to sleep, I’m tired, I’ll set the alarm for four in the afternoon and then I’ll just get up again. Guess what: since then I’ve been reasonably fresh after a day. Just a few good hours of sleep, get up, cook, watch TV, and then go back to bed. This leek says: listen to your body and power to the people.

By the way, I was in LA for Bridget Jones’s Baby, and really, the movie was… Sorry, I’m not allowed to say that. I had to sign three contracts that I can’t leak anything about the movie, Renée, Colin, or McDreamy. But here’s the trailer:

Geschreven door Ilonka Leenheer