Avoid Jet Lag With a Light Box and Melatonin
Jet lag, the wearying curse of travlling geeks everywhere. In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson offers this great description:
Her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
According to new research in the fabulously named The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (trust me, don’t go there), you can reset your circadian body clock simply and easily:
Both bright light and melatonin have successfully been used in laboratory and field settings to "phase advance" (resetting the circadian clock earlier in time so that all the circadian rhythms of the body occur earlier) thereby helping people adapt to night shift work or to a new time zone following rapid transmeridian jet travel. Melatonin alone has been shown to synchronize the circadian clock of the blind to the 24-hour day.
Long-haul travellers of the world rejoice!
Technorati Tags: jetlag, endocrine, melatonin, lightbox, travel, nerds, william gibson, pattern recognition
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