Here's a fun app for you, courtesy of American traveler I just bumped into.
He swears by it.
First thing I find online: A New York Times review
...and it opens with Queen Taylor. uh-hu.
“Jet lag is a choice,” said Taylor Swift after flying from Tokyo to Las Vegas to watch the Super Bowl.
In a fit of exhaustion-induced nausea, I turned desperately to Google, where I stumbled upon Timeshifter, an app that promises to make jet lag a thing of the past.
A mix of advice and scheduling, the app creates an individualized plan using your regular daily routine and your travel details
Ordinarily, I wouldn't touch NYT with a ten-foot pole but this one seemed innocent enough.
Everyone's got their trix for traveling across time zones — eat, don't eat; sleep, don't sleep; light exposure etc.
She slept through that first night and stayed awake through a four-hour car ride and a welcome party. She was able to dance the rest of the weekend away, fly home, and be ready for work on Monday morning like she never left the country
So this app is magic. Well, maybe not:
Others, such as staff writer Michael Cohen, who traveled from California to Japan for 10 days, still felt deeply exhausted in the days following his return—as he expected.
If the NYT says "the science is sound," I'm instantly skeptical, eh.
The app’s advice is centered around your circadian rhythm, the body’s natural clock. By slowly changing your sleep routine and exposure to light in the lead-up to your trip, you can shift the timing of your rhythm so that it’s easier to adapt to the time difference.
"'Of all the environmental cues, light is the most powerful synchronizer of our internal biological clock,' [scientist] Shetty said."
For sleep, he also recommends incrementally adjusting your sleeping times by up to one hour each day before travel (delaying bedtime for west-bound travelers, but advancing it for east-bound travelers), while making sure you still get seven to nine hours of sleep.
That takes some commitment, which is what the author keeps bashing on for the rest of the article. Can't be done by regular peeps working regular jobs.
The most convenient selling point for the app so far:
When you input your flight number, it even auto-populates for you rather than requiring you to manually add the details.
It also has helpful, but not incessant, notifications to keep you on track.
"what’s required of you in order to beat jet lag is often fundamentally incompatible with the demands of modern life. Maybe jet lag is a choice, just not one that most people can opt out of making."
Very interesting. Will try and report back (though I'm not jumping timezones seriously for a while again).