|
By Selling Magazine
He gives up a day to minimize the ravages of jet lag. "I found out long ago that if I didn't do this, I'd be falling asleep in afternoon meetings for the rest of the week."
Marsha Williams, a senior financial manager for Chicago-based Amoco Corp., says advice passed around in the company helped her evolve a strategy to deal with four or five Far Eastern trips (13-16 hours each way) per year. "Based on what others here have suggested, I never sleep on the plane either going or coming back,"
Williams says. "I tried sleeping en route originally, but that just seems to make jet lag worse. I also eat very little and drink only water." Williams usually tries to arrive in Tokyo, Hong Kong,
Singapore or mainland China by Saturday evening to be fit for business on Monday morning.
The toll that jet lag takes on business travelers has inevitably brought it under heavy attack. For more than a decade, the specialty of "chronobiology" has been getting more attention. Individual studies to identify both a prevention and cure for circadian dischronism have all followed generally similar paths. Currently, the most accessible approach is the set of complicated procedures put forth in the anti-jet-lag program devised by Charles Ehret, including what is sometimes called the Argonne Diet. (Dr. Ehret is the former director of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.)
Recent studies involving the brain hormone melatonin, however, have resulted in a major R&D push for a real jet lag pill. (Don't mistake anything on the market today for melatonin; current over-the-counter stuff is dubious at best.)
Meanwhile, dramatic successes in resetting the biological clocks of NASA astronauts by administering intense artificial light at programmed intervals suggests future methods for institutional prevention.
WHY WEST IS BEST
Why is flying east likely to aggravate jet lag? Researchers say that the typical human biological clock operates on roughly a 25-hour cycle, which obviously is not quite in synch with the precise, 24-hour daily routine of the planet on which we live. It may contribute to why getting up in the morning at all, anywhere, is normally difficult for some of us. Our bodies are telling us they would really rather wake up an hour later--one time zone to the West--every day. Flying westward, then, we can take advantage of this tendency to automatically offset the lag by the space of about one time zone. Flying east, on the other hand, your system inevitably adds that daily out-of-synch hour to the damage done.
|
