How to survive to Jet Lag – a Method Can Help You
14 marzo 2016 § Lascia un commento
This article is dedicated to all the people that often flight around the World; everybody know that it’s not easy to” absorb” the Jet Lag and mostly said that “that’s not a common method”, but from my personal experience and from information collect to BIG Corporate, before reading the article from HBR i suggest to follow this indication:
- use the computer of iPad of whatever only if you do not need to sleep, otherwise you’ll cannot sleep or your sleep will be restless
- Drink during the flight at least a glass of water every hour
- Drink a lot of water during the first and the second day
- try to follow the timezone by plan your trip “i need to sleep from … to…” or “i need to develop this job….”
- Develop training (jogging, Yoga…) for the first 2 days in the new time zone
- All the issue previously indicated are to plan in details and you need to follow it if you want to live well from the first minute.
Have a nice reading a let us your feedback
Jet Lag Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Business Trip
When business is conducted globally, we often have to travel long distances to launch projects, meet with partners, negotiate deals, address crises, manage customer relations, and engage in a variety of other activities on the behalf of our organizations. And if you have to cross time zones, it can wreak havoc on the circadian process that regulates sleep, leaving you feeling tired and groggy just when you need to be your most productive.
It may be tempting to assume that you can tough your way through jetlag. However, this belies the powerful physiological mechanisms at play. The circadian process utilizes a 24-hour clock-like cycle, and conforms to this cycle relatively precisely. On average, the cycle can adjust by about one hour per day(a little less when going East rather than West, as I’ll explain below.) However, when traveling across more than one time zone, the circadian rhythm becomes mismatched with your activity schedule. In other words, you will have a hard time sleeping when you want to sleep and a hard time staying awake when you want to be awake.
The greater the time change, the greater the mismatch. As a result, subjective energy levels suffer, and you’ll also suffer cognitive and performance decrements. So when you’re making difficult decisions during a negotiation in India, you will be cognitively impaired. When you’re trying to develop new customer relations in China, you will be irritable and more easily frustrated. Managing arduous tasks and intercultural interactions are already tricky enough; doing so while in a diminished cognitive state only adds to the difficulty.
Fortunately, the research literaturesuggests some smart strategies for ameliorating these effects. One approach is to at least partially pre-adjust your own activity schedule while you’re still in your home time zone, in order to prepare for the time zone you are traveling to. This is much easier when you are traveling East than West; going to sleep a few hours early is usually very difficult, but staying up a few hours later is typically more feasible. So if you live in New York and have an important trip in San Francisco, moving your bedtime and wake time an hour later each day during the three days leading up to the trip can give you a head start. You can try the same in the opposite direction, but try a smaller change each day (20 minutes instead of an hour). A similar strategy would be to arrive one or more days early in order to give your body more time to adjust to the new time zone.
If this is not feasible, then do your best to help your body adjust to the new time zone as fast as is reasonable. I sleep on the plane if it is at the time of day people would normally be asleep in my destination time zone. If I land in London at 9am local time, but my body is still on Boston time and it feels like 4am, I may be tempted to go to sleep. But a good strategy could be to stay up for the day. Walking outside and exposing yourself to sunlightcan help suppress melatonin production — a key promotor of sleep — minimizing feelings of sleepiness and encouraging your body to shift to the new time zone.
You and Your Team
-
Take the stress out of your next trip.
If you are trying to sleep in the new time zone, you may want to try the opposite. If I land in New York at 10pm local time and am departing from Seattle, it makes sense to try to get to sleep on the East Coast schedule as soon as is reasonable. Light manipulation can play a role in this process. Blue lightthat’s emitted from your digital devices and most lightbulbs, in particular, suppresses melatonin. That’s why, when I travel, I bring glasses that filter out blue light. I wear them at night a few hours before I want to go to sleep at a local time that is earlier than it would have been in my home time zone. Using this strategy to block blue light from electronic devices and lightbulbs minimizes melatonin inhibition, thus promoting sleep. Some people may choose to take melatonin supplements to help even further.
These strategies can be effective, but will be limited in the degree to which they can move your circadian process in the desired direction. Moreover, for some short trips, you may decide that it is not worth it to get your circadian process in alignment with the local time — especially because you have to go through the difficulties of switching back when you return.
In such cases, there are two strategies left. One is to try to be strategic about your schedule in the new time zone, optimizing your work activities for your own circadian rhythm. To a lesser degree, you may be able to do the same in the new time zone. Find out when your peak periods of energy and alertnesswould be in your home time zone, and try to schedule the most important activities in your temporary time zone to line up with your own energy levels. For example, when I travel from Seattle to Singapore, I try to schedule the most important activity for 8am Singapore time, which is 5pm Seattle time, when I would typically be at a high energy level. Waiting until 3pm in Singapore would feel like midnight to my body, and I know I would be more tired. I may still be working at that time, but hopefully I have switched to less important activities by then.
The last ditch strategy you can use is caffeine. Caffeine masks many of the feelings of sleep deprivation and circadian misalignment — primarily by blocking adenosine signals that tell your body you should be feeling tired. Caffeine does not fully eliminate the effects of jetlag, but it will lower the likelihood that you have to struggle to stay awake when you want to be awake. But beware; not only does caffeine persist in your system long after you drink it, making it harder to fall asleep later, but the more you drink caffeine the more you will come to depend on it.
None of these strategies is ideal. It’s not realistic to assume that you will be able to fully adjust to local time right away, or completely eliminate the effects of circadian misalignment. However, the greater the degree to which you can use these strategies, the more likely you will be able to perform well on your trip. Tilt the odds in your favor as much as you can.
Wtco 
Rispondi