Jet Lag is No Joke

My flight was booked from San Francisco to the East Coast for Thanksgiving with my family.

Yes, I was brave enough to traverse the notoriously bad holiday flight schedule to get home since we seem to keep having these short windows of opportunity to get together.

I left the Monday before Thanksgiving for my sister’s home where my parents have just moved. But just prior to my departure, my sister sent me a message that the bathroom remodel would still be going on the first day I arrived and there would be jackhammering, making the house very noisy, probably too noisy to get work done.

She had a solution. I could come with her to her office.

Wait a minute, I said. What time do the contractors arrive?

At 8am, when I leave for work.

You do realize that my body clock would be 5am when they arrive and I’d need to get up at least 1.5-2 hours prior to be ready to leave… more like a 3am body clock.

Jet lag is no joke. It has a similar impact on the body as shift-workers, which the World Health Organization has declared a carcinogen, leading to all types of issues such as chronic inflammation, diabetes and cancer.

Jet lag, like shift work, impacts the natural circadian rhythm of your body. It’s how your brain and all your internal organs know when to do their jobs. Your brain no longer knows when to produce melatonin to help you fall asleep at the correct time or to release cortisol to wake you up. Your pancreas no longer knows when to release insulin to help soak up glucose and help digest your food so it doesn’t sit in your stomach and get stored as fat. Muscle repair, memory and learning are all impacted as well.

“Slowly it became clear that a disrupted clock is the mother of all maladies, and, conversely, in most chronic diseases, clock function is compromised,” wrote Dr. Satchin Panda, an expert on the circadian rhythm and professor at the Salk Institute.

The painful impact of jet lag is all too real for me. I spent two decades flying back and forth from the West Coast to the East Coast every month for my business.

The result was insomnia, burnout, lack of energy and motivation, poor decision making, and regretful personal interactions.

It wasn’t sustainable, so I put sleep at the center of my life, for myself, for my business and for those I love.

A week before heading to the East Coast for Thanksgiving, I began a process of using Behavior design, along with Expert advice, and Data-informed changes to sleep. This B.E.D. approach is what we train and practice during our Champions of Sleep program. Here’s how it worked:

I designed a new wind-down and wake-up routine recommended by our sleep experts that slowly shifted my bedtime and wake-up time earlier. I monitored this using my sleep tracking wearable and made adjustments based on the data each day.

Along with sunlight as early as possible every day and some supplements when I arrived to help sleep that first night, I was able to get enough rest to get up before the jackhammering started.

I swapped out the early morning trip to my sister’s office with a morning run to help with resetting my circadian clock from the jet lag.

The next night East Coast bedtime for me came on time, and the next morning I was able to wake up, get my work done and show up with a smile and gratitude for my family. As a bonus, I ran an impromptu 8am Turkey Trot 5k two mornings later on Thanksgiving Day and surprised myself with a first place finish in my age group.

Jet lag transition protocol a success!