I have endured another coccyx-compressing pond-jump and am back in Paris. Getting off the plane I immediately overheard one woman saying Ça m'emmerde ("That pisses me off", literally 'that enshits me') and another woman saying Fait chier (ditto, lit. '(that) makes (me) crap'). Nice to be home.
I always do quite poorly with jetlag. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to really recover, and until then I spend a lot of my waking hours in a fog. In French the analogue of jetlag is décalage horaire, 'time shift,' but I prefer the Japanese jisa boke, 'time-difference stupidity.'
This time I'm trying to arrange my light and dark times according to this calculator. Though I didn't get the light-avoidance time in today. Instead I sat at a café with JD, who magnanimously brought me groceries and then lugged them and my luggage up those forever-damned six flights, and generally poked me until the late afternoon so that I didn't fall asleep. I will try the first day's program of light and darkness tomorrow, which says to avoid light between 8am and 1pm, and then to have bright light between 1pm and 4pm. Wish me luck.
I missed my chance to pick up some melatonin while in the states; it's not available here. But another soporific I like, courtesy my friend Jf, is Celestial Seasonings' new offering Sleepytime Extra tea (really a tisane), which Jf calls "Sleepy Opium Bear". I mean, just look at that bear. Obviously he's on something pretty fly. The difference between Sleepytime Extra and classic Sleepytime tea is valerian root, which apparently, as they say on the box, makes it extra. Oddly I never seem to be able to find Sleepytime Extra in the states, but it's available at Thanksgiving.
Expats and world travelers, how do you beat the jetlag? I know some people don't really experience jetlag... and to them I say, ça m'emmerde.
4 comments:
Thanks for the good recommendations.
For eastbound, I take an over-the-counter sleeping pill (a gel-tab) the minute I sit down on the plane, then get totally nerdy with noise-cancelling headphones,eye-blinders and the foam neck roll. throwaway socks on my feet. If I get at least 3-4 hours of sleep in flight, it usually does the trick.
Kinda.
Oh and no cheating by napping once in France.
Westbound is trickier, but I just try not to sleep at all. I've watched some of the most idiotic in-flight movies in an attempt to stay up for the whole flight. Not a wink.
Can't wait to try the sleepytime extra.
P.S. Do you want my bottle of melatonin? It never works for me.
A family friend shared with me his fail-proof jet-lag cure: spend the entire night awake, drinking and carrying on until dawn. Crash at sunrise (preferably in some bushes) and the next day, spend the entire day awake. Come evening you'll be so tortured tired that you won't be able to do anything but sleep. From then on, your body is miraculously attuned to local time!
I have yet to try this (he was a child during the Hamburg firebombing and something tells me he might be tougher than me) but it could be worth a go if nothing else works!
Lovely blog!
Polly: Thanks for the tips. I stay up for westbound, too, and that seems to work for me. It's eastbound that knocks me out. Even if I get sleep on the plane and don't nap I just can't shift my circadian clock.
Melatonin never worked for me either. :(
Aralena: lol!! And thanks!
Eastbound many-hour jetlag! Auugh! I'm so sorry!
One melatonin trick I learned is that smaller doses work better than larger ones for me; 1mg is better than 2mg or 5mg.
That whole "stay up a gazillion hours" thing does Not Work for me; it triggers migraines, in fact. I like your "fidget with light" idea better. Let us know how it works. I also like your Sleepytime Extra idea. I loooove that it says on the website that it doesn't contain caffeine!
There was an herbal sleep/anxiety pill in Germany that I quite liked which I assumed I could get in the US and cannot, which had hops extract in it. Otherwise I think it's much the same as your Sleeptime tisane. If you can try something hops-extract-y, perhaps that would help as well.
Bon chance!
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