The Nightmare of Jet Lag and How to Beat It

Business travel is tiring even for relatively short trips. Working on navigating through airports, dealing with delays, delivering your luggage, finding transportation in your destination city and getting to the meeting is a lot more stress than you usually go through by doing business at home. But when you add the problems caused by jet lag, you're experiencing physical distress that can almost feel like you've become sick because your body reacts to long-distance travel.

So it's a good idea to have some ready-to-use techniques to prevent jet lag when traveling abroad or across multiple time zones. Yes, you can get jet lag just by traveling from East Coast to West Coast locally. Jet-to-haul comes from the change in time zones and the adjustment your body has to make to deal with new time cycles in that time zone.

We are not aware of this but our bodies are finely tuned to work at their best in the time zone of our homes. Our biological clocks are adjusted to react to the time of day, the cycle of day and night, environmental factors and the magnetism of the local environment. We have an internal monitor that tells us when we should sleep or be active based on that internal clock.

When we travel to a new time zone, while our mind finds it strange that it is a new time of day that is not synchronized with what we know, our bodies undergo a dramatic adjustment to adapt to the new environment. That's why in a new time zone, you may not be able to sleep when it's 11 p.m. where you are because your body, it may be the mid-afternoon or the next morning.

Symptoms of jet lag are fatigue, lack of appetite, short mood and even a feeling of mild nausea that comes from an internal system thrown into an episode. So the best treatment for jet lag is good preparation so you can ease the location change without much worry. By reducing the effects of jet lag before it happens, you make it more likely that your business meetings will go well.

* Start editing in advance. If you manage to put yourself on the timeframe of your destination a few days ago, jet lag won't be severe. Start adjusting your sleep times and when you take your meals even before the trip starts so that you are "living in that time zone" even before you make the trip.

* Maintain a clean diet. Jesuit-lag experts advise to significantly simplify your diet for several days before the flight. Start reducing the amount of heavy foods, carbohydrates, sugars and fats in your diet and increasing the level of fruits, vegetables and juices you consume. This will make your system smarter and more adaptable to change.

* Give yourself time on the other end. Try to make arrangements to arrive the day before your meetings so that you have time in your hotel room to rest and prepare to achieve business goals.

* Eliminate sources of physical stress. During a stressful time, try to reduce physical stress such as drinking or intense physical exercise so that your body has more reserves to deal with jet lag symptoms.

By thinking ahead about jet lag, you are taking the measures you need to take to eliminate a threat to the success of your business goals on this journey. So your work to get jet lag out of your work's travel equation is just a good job on your part and will lead to more success on the road for you and your company.