Jet Lag Quotes

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that 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.

My heart has jet lag.

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

There’s a sort of jet lag when you time-travel to your own past.

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos-- we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags-- four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon-- but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant-- sail for Asia and stumble on America-- and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

The computer beeped as the upload completed. A moment later, Ian Kabra appeared on the screen. Dan was surprised. "Hey, Ian, isn't it, like, two in the morning back there?" "It's called jet lag," Ian informed him. "I'm still on London time. I don't suppose you savages have any tea in this mausoleum." "There's a diet Snapple in the fridge." Ian shuddered. "I thought not.

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

If left to her own devices, Kaine would probably end up on the next plane for New Zealand in the hopes her stalker didn’t care for international travel and horrible jet lag.

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding.

When was the last time we slept?" "Day before yesterday?" Amy asked with a frown. "I know what you mean. This is some jet lag. Let's get a coffee while we make a plan." "Oh, yeah. Jet lag. That must be it," Dan agreed as he trailed after her to the espresso bar. "Not the fact that we pulled off a museum heist, went without sleep and food, and oh, yeah—did I mention this—almost got killed? Jet lag. That's why we're tired." "Well, if you want to get technical.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

It's time now to rent a car, roll down the windows and prepare for your first big thrill: the freeways. They're so much fun they should charge admission. Never fret about zigzagging back and forth through six lanes of traffic at high speeds; it erases jet lag in a split second. You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration.

There really is no downside to travel, save a little jet lag and a dented bank account. A small price to pay for a million-dollar experience.

when two strains compete for the same resources, the strain with an internal timing system that is most adapted to its temporal environment has the greatest advantage.

I think you look...very nice." the way he said it, with a slight pause and that sexy accent, made Sharona forget all about jet lag. Instead, she was on high flirt alert.

1. . . . I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous and open about the people – and everything actually works.

It's this or a short hospital stay," she said, greeting Scarlett with a raised glass of a deep red liquid with a celery stalk sticking out of the top. "Bloody Marys are one of the truly medicinal cocktails. The only way I can beat this jet lag is by staying up all day, and this is going to keep me alive. And who is this?" This was directed at Marlene, who was stalking along behind Scarlett like a wet cat.

First class of today was an elective he´s taking out of a combination of morbid fascination and academic curiosity: The Press and the Presidency. He's currently jet-lagged to all hell fom trying to keep the press from ruining the presidency, and the irony isn't lost on him.

But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.

Here is the burden of my argument with life. I have forgotten homesickness.

At the house, Margaret was lying on the sofa. She was exhausted. Helen did not know why. Nobody got jet lag flying in from London.

Probably jet lag.

Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler’s question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. “For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky,” Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn’t strike everyone. “There’s nothing I can do, so it’s really quite liberating. There’s nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It’s beautiful.” Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again. His

Nearing two a.m., Liam stretched and yawned, smiling at me. “Don’t you have jet-lag or something? I’ve kept you up too late.” His smile was impossible not to reciprocate. I could feel a smile blossoming unwillingly across my face. “It’s okay. Your mom paid me to stay up and talk to you.” He didn’t even miss a beat. “Well that’s good, since Emily sent a check over in advance for my services to keep you out of trouble.

Jet lag results from our rapid motion between time zones, across the lines that we have drawn on the earth that equate light with time, and time with geography. Yet our sense of place is scrambled as easily as our body’s circadian rhythms. Because jet lag refers only to a confusion of time, to a difference measured by hours, I call this other feeling ‘place lag’: the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes.

because it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.

In the United States, melatonin is commonly taken as a treatment for jet lag or insomnia. It is, as James Hamblin has written, “one of the very few hormones that you can purchase in the United States without a prescription. It is considered a dietary supplement and therefore held to essentially no premarket standards of quality, safety, or efficacy.

I work when I’m sick, happy, depressed, constipated, jet-lagged. I show up. If I can’t work, I go to Home Depot.” 

Sometimes you don't know until you go ahead and do it. It might work out right. It might not.

The phase of an individual’s body clock in relationship to a zeitgeber is a biological phenomenon and not a matter of discipline.

A systematic pattern on weekends appears: early types become sleep deprived on free days as a consequence of the social pressure exerted by their owlish friends, who are the majority.

We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Jey lag is just one symptom of the way I feel snapped off, without a proper beginning or end--not just in body and mind but in the rise and ebb of emotions and memory. Perhaps what's happening during this thing called, too generically, 'jet lag,' is the ability to travel so quickly from one place to a hugely different other place, and the mind's desire to be with the body, which it simply cannot. It is the mind stretching, or shrinking, or maybe searching, or all three, to pick up what got left behind.

Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that 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. She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actual speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he's off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbow, but it's only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with you bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

We were flying to Brisbane via Kuala Lumpur, a journey of around fifteen hours, including the brief transit stop. Australia was a long way from anywhere yet modern aviation had made travel so convenient and affordable that no one really thought of it as difficult or hazardous anymore. Today’s travel woes centered around overcoming jet lag or figuring out your duty-free limits. I tried to imagine life in the eighteenth century when the First Fleet made the long and arduous sea voyage from Great Britain. The aviation industry was non-existent at that time, steam-powered ships were still decades away and the sailing vessels that arrived in 1788 took over a hundred days to reach Sydney.

«Sono Maylee Meriweather. Il mio nome viene dalla mia nonnina May e dal mio nonnino Lee». Lui la guardò. «Ti prego, dimmi che le parole “nonnina” e “nonnino” non sono appena uscite dalla tua bocca». Lei inclinò la testa di lato e batté lentamente le palpebre, di nuovo. Poi ridacchiò, la sua risata era musicale, dolce e giovane. «Tu devi essere il signor Grifondoro»

Your internal time is produced by your own body clock. It varies from individual to individual just as body height, eye color, or personality varies, and it interacts with sun time and social time. In spite of internal time being probably the most important to our health and well-being--more important than sun time and certainly more important than social time--it has been thoroughly neglected.

Once enlightened, they started to understand themselves (and others) much better, began to appreciate their own individual time, and were suddenly relieved of the weight of prejudice ridiculing their temporal habits: for example, being called lazy if you don't wake up fresh as a daisy by seven o'clock in the morning; or being called a boring person only because you don't enjoy going out with friends after ten at night.

Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

A strange jet-lag numbness filled my head. I couldn’t separate the boundary between what was real and what only seemed real. Here I was, on a small Greek island, sharing a meal with a beautiful older woman I’d met only the day before. This woman loved Sumire. But couldn’t feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loved this woman and desired her. I loved Sumire and felt sexual desire for her. Sumire liked me but didn’t love me, and didn’t feel any desire for me. I felt sexual desire for a woman who will remain anonymous. But I didn’t love her. It was all so complicated, like something out of an existential play.

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except

But those constant interruptions strain the brain further and make a hash of our time. For every interruption, Jonathan Spira writes, it takes ten to twenty times the amount of the interruption time to return to the previous task: It can take five minutes after a mere thirty-second interruption to get back on track. Fully one-third of every worker’s day, he reports, is taken up by these endless cycles of unnecessary interruptions. Even Fortune 500 CEOs, with the ultimate power to predict and control their own time, are not immune. One study found they averaged only twenty-eight uninterrupted, productive minutes a day.24 “This overwhelm is not any one thing,” Huda Akil told me. “It’s not just technology. It’s not just two-career couples. It’s a thousand little stabs. You put that together and it’s like being constantly slightly jet-lagged.

So, a few years ago, while I was presenting at a conference in Europe, my wife called and insisted that the walls of our laundry room were throbbing. That was the word she used. Pulsing, like the wall itself was alive. She described a hum, an energy, that she could feel as soon as she walked into the room. I suggested it was a wiring problem. She became … let’s just say, agitated at that point. Three days later, just before I was due to come back, she called again. The problem was getting worse, she said. There was an audible hum now, from the wall. She couldn’t sleep. She could hear it as soon as she walked in the house. She could feel it, the vibration, like something unnatural was ready to burst forth into our world. So, I flew home the next day, and found her extremely upset. I understood immediately why my suggestion of a wiring problem was so insulting—this was the sound of something alive. Something massive. So, even though I was exhausted, jet-lagged and just completely dead on my feet, I had no other thought than to go out to the garage, get my tools and peel off the siding. Guess what I found.” I didn’t answer. “Guess!” “I’m not sure I want to know.” “Bees. They had built an entire hive in the wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling. Tens of thousands of them.” His face was lighting up with the telling of his amusing anecdote. Why not? He was getting paid to tell it. “So I went and put on a hat and gloves and wrapped my wife’s scarf around my face and sprayed the hive, I killed them by the thousands. Only later did I realize that the bees are quite valuable and a local beekeeper actually came and carefully removed the hive itself at no charge. I think he’d have actually paid me if I hadn’t killed so many of them at the start.” “Hmm.” “Do you understand?” “Yeah, your wife thought it was a monster. Turned out to just be bees. So my little problem, probably just bees. It’s all bees. Nothing to worry about.” “I’m afraid you misunderstood. That was the day that a very powerful, very dangerous monster turned out to be real. Just ask the bees.

Tim bid us good-bye after helping us carry in my three-hundred-pound suitcase, and Marlboro Man and I looked around our quiet house, which was spick-and-span and smelled of fresh paint and leather cowboy boots, which lined the wall near the front door. The entry glowed with the light of the setting sun coming in the window, and I reached down to grab one of my bags so I could carry it to the bedroom. But before my hand made it to the handle, Marlboro Man grabbed me tightly around the waist and carried me over to the leather sofa, where we fell together in a tired heap of jet lag, emotional exhaustion, and--ironically, given the week we’d just endured--a sudden burst of lust. “Welcome home,” he said, nuzzling his face into my neck. Mmmm. This was a familiar feeling. “Thank you,” I said, closing my eyes and savoring every second. As his lips made their way across my neck, I could hear the sweet and reassuring sound of cows in the pasture east of our house. We were home. “You feel so good,” he said, moving his hands to the zipper of my casual black jacket. “You do, too,” I said, stroking the back of his closely cut hair as his arms wrapped more and more tightly around my waist. “But…uh…” I paused. My black jacket was by now on the floor. “I…uh…,” I continued. “I think I need to take a shower.” And I did. I couldn’t do the precise calculation of what it had meant for my hygiene to cross back over the international date line, but as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t showered in a decade. I couldn’t imagine christening our house in such a state. I needed to smell like lilac and lavender and Dove soap on the first night in our little house together. Not airline fuel. Not airports. Not clothes I’d worn for two days straight. Marlboro Man chuckled--the first one I’d heard in many days--and as he’d done so many times during our months of courtship, he touched his forehead to mine. “I need one, too,” he said, a hint of mischief in his voice. And with that, we accompanied each other to the shower, where, with a mix of herbal potions, rural water, and determination, we washed our honeymoon down the drain.

The emotional equivalent of jet lag is the end of a love affair and yet you, foolish and besotted lover, won’t let go. You’re still keeping time by his sun and moon, waking when he wakes, and sleeping only when he closes his eyes.

CHRONOTYPE: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER Know your chronotype, and establish those of close friends and family. Use the Munich University questionnaire if you’re not sure. Manipulate your day so you can be at your best when it matters most. Use caffeine as a strategic performance enhancer, not out of habit – and no more than 400mg per day. PMers – don’t lie in at weekends if you want to beat social jet lag. Fit meeting rooms, offices and desks with daylight lamps to improve alertness, productivity and mood at work. Know when to step up and when to take a back seat: should you volunteer to take a penalty in a late-night match when you’re an AMer? Learn to work in harmony with your partner if your chronotypes differ.

SIX BIRD KIDS and one very jet-lagged flying dog

Remember, late bedtimes usually cause less night sleep. In addition, sleeping out of phase with the body’s natural rhythms, as shift workers do or as travelers do when crossing time zones, is as unhealthy as jet lag syndrome.

Maybe I knew nothing of love—not what it was, what it meant to be in it, or what to do when you were—but maybe, just maybe, it meant finding a boy who only smiled and then holding his hand when he frowned.

Crushes are very strange things; they’re a warning sign in the word itself—crush: to deform, pulverize, or force inward by compressing forcefully. Whoever decided it was a good idea to equate deformity and compression to blooming affection was either very high or a genius—or maybe lost somewhere in between. But for good or bad, I could feel it: my heart pressing inward until the sound of it beating filled my ears again. I had a deformed, pulverized, compressed force on Chris, and there was nothing I could do about it.

But if there is something to the relationship of being a late type and being able to endure and "sleep in," then late types are better night-hunters than early chronotypes. The lateness of teenagers in our modern industrial age may be a remnant of a skill that accompanies the age of peak physical condition.

It is quite remarkable how firmly belief and conviction stand in the way of reasoning,

It is quite remarkable how firmly belief and conviction stand in the way of reasoning.

The fact that many early types actually use an alarm clock (despite always waking up before it rings) must lie in some unfounded paranoia about not waking up in time for work.

—¿Los vampiros sufren el jet-lag? Veneno se quitó las gafas para mostrarle sus impactantes ojos, con pupilas verticales como las de las serpientes. Aunque ya los había visto antes, Elena sintió un vuelco en el corazón, una respuesta visceral a la extraña inteligencia de esa mirada. Una parte de ella se preguntaba si sus ojos eran lo único en él que había cambiado con la Conversión. ¿Veneno pensaba como los humanos, o su intelecto era más bien de sangre fría? —¿Te estás ofreciendo a aliviar mis dolores, cazadora? —inquirió el vampiro. Se pasó la lengua por uno de sus largos incisivos y sacó una gota dorada de veneno—. Me siento conmovido. —Solo pretendía ser amable —dijo ella. Las pupilas de Veneno se contrajeron en el instante en que volvió a ponerse las gafas. Elena no pudo evitarlo. —¿Por qué no tienes la lengua bífida? —¿Por qué no puedes volar? —Una sonrisa desdeñosa—. Esas cosas que tienes en la espalda no están de adorno, ¿lo sabías? Elena le mostró el dedo corazón a modo de respuesta.

Her back was very straight as she walked away, despite the fact that, on top of jet lag, she must have been up all night taking charge of my life.

Over the course of those few days in South Africa, I felt myself floating. This visit was a long way from my first trip to Kenya in 1991, when I’d ridden around with Barack in matatus and pushed Auma’s broken-down VW along the side of a dusty road. What I felt was one part jet lag, maybe, but two parts something more profound and elating. It was as if we’d stepped into the larger crosscurrents of culture and history, reminded suddenly of our relative smallness in the wider arc of time.

Its entire mainland territory, which extends over almost a sixth of the earth’s circumference, is fused into one single time zone referenced to Beijing sun time.9 When people in western China look at their watch and see that it is 10:00 P.M., it is actually only 7:24 P.M. by sun time, and if they had to get up at six in the morning to go to work, it would by local sun time be only 3:24 A.M. I have been told that the western Chinese population actually doesn’t orchestrate social life by Beijing time. For example, when they come together for an early evening meal (say at around 7 P.M. local sun time), they would arrange to meet at 11 P.M.

You see, this book is about larks and owls from beginning to end!

The journey of these algae during their vertical migration is quite extraordinary, considering their size. A change of depth by ten meters is equivalent to us walking eighteen kilometers. We know that algae and other plankton can travel considerably more than fifty meters during their vertical migration down and back up, which would mean that we would have to travel 180 kilometers every day. The small creatures do not swim these large distances actively. Instead, they make themselves lighter or heavier than water by filling their cell with gas bubbles or getting rid of them. 6

A recent Danish project has eliminated timetables entirely and left the decision about when to arrive at school to the students.6 One of the teachers of this school in Copenhagen recently pointed out in a television interview that schools should be regarded as service centers, and so they are required to offer the best possible service to their customers, meaning the optimal environment for achieving the best education possible. Allowing students to sleep and work at their optimal times should definitely be part of this service.

As you read in the introduction, time-zone time is the temporal reference that people have lived by since the late nineteenth century, when the world was subdivided into twenty-four time zones. Before that, the temporal reference was local sun time. It is quite remarkable that we find—in the first part of the twenty-first century—that our body clocks still live very much like those of our ancestors, namely by sun time, while our entire social life has to conform to a different schedule.

The farther from the equator that humans live, the higher the overall rate of suicide, and the larger the difference in suicide rates between summer and winter.

It is quite remarkable how many aspects of our lives are influenced by industrialization and its consequences, isolating us increasingly from natural signals.

Humans are primates, and primates are mammals. The first mammals appeared on earth between 200 and 250 million years ago—a very short time in evolutionary units. To put that figure in perspective, the first primitive unicellular organisms appeared roughly 4,500 million years ago; the first cell with a proper nucleus appeared about 1,500 million years ago;7 and the first animals with bones inside their body appeared on land only 380 million years ago.

Only about 60 percent of conceptions actually lead to a birth. The number of natural abortions of unrecognized pregnancies during their first weeks might even decrease this rate.

Despite these barriers, the number of schools trying out other timetables for adolescent students is rapidly increasing in several countries, from Switzerland to the United States.

Here’s how it works: at around seven to eight p.m. London time I would take a melatonin pill, triggering an artificial rise in circulating melatonin that mimics the natural melatonin spike currently occurring in most of the people in London. As a consequence, my brain is fooled into believing it’s nighttime, and with that chemically induced trick comes the signaled timing of the sleep race. It will still be a struggle to generate the event of sleep itself at this irregular time (for me), but the timing signal does significantly increase the likelihood of sleep in this jet-lagged context.

Just like the pro athletes do, you can start a few days ahead of time by doing the following: • Take ½ milligram of melatonin at specific times during the day (it depends on how many time zones you’re crossing and which direction you’re going). • Soak up (or avoid) bright light exposure in the mornings and/or evenings. • Gradually move your sleep and wake times to help you achieve alignment with the new time. • For the custom specifics you’ll need to make this work, talk to your doctor or a sleep physician once you know your travel details, or try a jet lag optimization calculator, which is easy to find online.

Then, in a blink of the eye, we invented the modern postindustrial world. Suddenly some of us can take it easy 24/7 in ways unimaginable to earlier generations. Instead of walking, carrying, digging, running, and throwing, we sit for most of the day in ergonomically designed chairs, stare at screens, and press buttons. The only catch is we still inherited our active ancestors’ thrifty genes that rely on physical activity to grow, maintain, and repair our bodies. Incessant sitting combined with modern diets and other novelties thus contributes to evolutionary mismatches, defined as conditions that are more common and severe today than in the past because our bodies are poorly adapted to novel environmental conditions.3 The twenty-first-century world, of course, is not without extraordinary benefits. Today, nearly seven billion of us live longer and healthier lives than most of our Stone Age forebears ever did, many of us enjoying comforts beyond the imaginations of pharaohs and emperors of yore. But just as we never evolved to cope with jet lag or guzzle gallons of soda, we never evolved to be persistently physically inactive.

My body feels different when I’m on Avi Family Time. I’ve got the light-headed, unfocused, disorientated feeling of jet lag all day. I am starving for lunch at eleven, yawning and thinking of a nap at two. I watch Avi, otherwise so impatient and bad-tempered—the sort of man who complains in restaurants and mutters in queues—do it all with no grumbling. Not just that, with genuine joy. It’s quite incredible.

These drugs also broke chromosomes, which is a well-known specific chemical mechanism by which drugs cause cancer.

Testing intermittent use (3 times a week), a recent study showed a similar result with zolpidem (Ambien).  After several weeks of use, those taking this sleeping pill were sleeping better when they took the drug but then worse when they skipped it.[26] Overall, after several weeks of use, their sleep was averaging no better than a group taking inactive placebo.

people who take sleeping pills such as eszopiclone, zaleplon, and zolpidem have about a 44% higher risk of developing infections such as sinusitis, pharyngitis, upper respiratory tract infections, influenza, herpes, and so forth.[35] There has been essentially no discussion of this risk in the medical literature, but it is statistically extremely convincing, based on studies which the manufacturers submitted to the FDA and some of their published controlled trials.

One mechanism is that zolpidem (and probably other sleeping pills) relax the stomach sphincter and cause gastro-esophageal regurgitation. The acid irritation may lead to infection. Incidentally, acid regurgitation may also lead to esophageal cancer, which is one of the cancers most greatly increased among sleeping pill users. At

Another side effect of sleeping pills is depression. The sleeping pill industry would like you to believe that insomnia leads to depression, implying that sleeping pills might prevent depression. It isn’t so. The controlled trials of zaleplon, zolpidem, eszopiclone, and ramelteon mentioned in the FDA NDA documents show a higher rate of developing depression among those given the sleeping pills as compared to those given placebo.

In essence, the bee's azimuth system acts like a sundial run in reverse, and like a sundial, it has to be calibrated. A sundial, which must be oriented with respect to a known compass direction, calculates the time of day based on where the sun is; the navigational centers in the bee's brain calculate where the sun should be based on the time of day. As a consequence, the one thing that bees can't cope with is the discalibration that results from jet lag. In a famous 1960s experiment, Max Renner packed up a hive of bees in Long Island, New York, flew them to Davis, California, and tested their ability to navigate with the sun as a landmark. The jetlagged bees consistently misoriented themselves by 45 degrees, precisely as though they believed it was three hours later. The complex circuitry that allows the bee to use the sun as a guide is built in, but it is not that genes trump the environment (or the other way around). Instead, genes enable creatures to make sensible use of their particular environment. Learning is not the antithesis of innateness but one of its most important products.

ahead, burning with embarrassment, confusion and most of all, the unshakeable feeling that I had done something wrong only I didn’t know what. And if he hadn’t apologized by the time we landed, I could always push him down the escalators at Heathrow and say it was an accident. We spent the rest of the flight in silence, listening to Maura’s choked sobs every time the plane shook, followed by another wordless hour in customs and nearly two more driving home. I was half awake, half asleep, delirious from jet lag and unwelcome tears. I didn’t care about the ring at all any more, all I wanted to know was why Adam was so incredibly angry.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit …that will last….” —John 15:16 (NIV) Hi, Dad,” the voice on the phone said, a bit muffled and faraway. “Oh, it’s you, Will.” You can always recognize your children’s voices, even as they grow older and more mature. “Can you hear me better now?” It sounded like he was in the office next door. I went through a quick mental calculation. Today was Monday. That meant he was in Singapore, part of a weeklong trip for his job. “Yes, it’s very clear. What time is it there?” I looked at the clock: 5:30 pm in New York City. “Five thirty in the morning on Tuesday. Singapore is twelve hours ahead. I’m still jet-lagged.” “How was your trip?” “I had a seventeen-hour layover in Tokyo. I took the train in from the airport and the train back, so I saw a little of the city.” “Sounds great.” “Maybe I’ll go back sometime and see more of it. I can’t stay on the phone long, Dad. I have a meeting soon with the office in California and wanted to be sure I could get good reception, so I had to choose somebody to talk to. I chose you.” I chose you. “I’m glad you did. I hope the meeting goes well.” “It should. Love you, Dad.” “Love you, Will.” I put down the phone and pondered his words for a moment: “I chose you.” It’s often said our families are given to us, but our friends we get to choose. It occurred to me we choose our families too. We make choices about being close to them, staying in touch, nurturing relationships that run deeper than blood. There’s a lot to be said for a two-minute conversation from across the world. Let me always choose to love, Lord. —Rick Hamlin

When after a few days the party relocated to Kazakhstan on an ancient plane chartered by NASA, the mood became even more festive. Jet lag, frigid temperatures that shocked even Canadians and a complete absence of language skills were apparently remedied with wild nights in various Baikonur “hot spots.” When Helene and the kids trooped over from the hotel to see me for the hour or two we were allotted to be together each day, they brought increasingly colorful stories about sensible, hard-working relatives and friends who had, the night before, morphed into vodka-loving party animals with a taste for wearing other people’s bras draped on their heads like berets.

We arrived in Ulm just after the honeymoon, the moving there only prolonging it. Having slept that glorious jet-lag sleep right into evening on our first day, we took a walk through the streets of our new city, laughing aloud at our good fortune. How could we be living here?

Anxious to defend his adopted city—especially his side of town, the less fashionable west end—Eli considered giving Veronica a condensed lecture on the history of Asheville, North Carolina. 1880: the Western North Carolina Railroad completed a line from Salisbury to Asheville, which later enabled George Washington Vanderbilt to construct the Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence in America. Over time, that 179,000 square foot house transitioned into a multi- million dollar company. Which lured in tourists. Who created thousands of jobs. Which caused the sprawl flashing by Eli’s window at fifty-five miles per hour. But Eli refrained from being the Local Know-It-All, remembering all the times he’d traveled to new cities and some cabbie wanted to play docent, wanted to tell him about the real Cleveland or the hidden Miami. Instead, he let the air conditioner chase away the remnants of his jet lag and thought about Almario “Go Go” Gato. He waited for Veronica to say something about the Blue Ridge Mountains, which stood alongside the highway, hovering over the valley below like stoic parents waiting for their kids to clean up their messy bedrooms. Eli gave her points for her silence. And for ditching the phone, even if she kept glancing anxiously toward the glove compartment every time it buzzed. The car rode smooth, hardly a bump. For a resident of Los Angeles, she drove cautiously, obeying all traffic laws. Eli had a perfect driving record. Well, almost perfect. There was that time he drove the Durham Bulls’ chartered Greyhound into the right field fence during the seventh inning stretch. But that was history. Almost ancient.

The first oversees tour Then it was make-or-break time for me. We went to [Australia] New Zealand, Alice Springs. This was the real hard crunch, the hard end of being the Princess of Wales. There were thousands of press following us. We were away six weeks and the first day we went to this school in Alice Springs. It was hot, I was jet-lagged, being sick. I was too thin. The whole world was focusing on me every day. I was in the front of the papers. I thought that this was just so appalling, I hadn’t done something specific like climb Everest or done something wonderful like that. However, I came back from this engagement and I went to my lady-in-waiting, cried my eyes out and said: ‘Anne, I’ve got to go home, I can’t cope with this.’ She was devastated, too, because it was her first job. So that first week was such a traumatic week for me, I learned to be royal in inverted commas in one week. I was thrown into the deep end. Now I prefer it that way. Nobody ever helped me at all. They’d be there to criticize me, but never there to say ‘Well done.

Entre su jet lag y las horas que tardé yo en conciliar el sueño, despertamos ambos alrededor de las siete de la tarde. Era de noche, y el piso estaba en calma, en silencio. Dos almas abiertas en canal en medio de la ciudad que nunca duerme, y se respiraba quietud. El mundo es un lugar muy loco

he defeated the ravages of jet-lag by obeying the dictates of his hunger, and living not on Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time or the date-line time where he was, but instead on what he dubbed his “tummy-time”, eating and sleeping when his stomach told him to.

At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag. How wonderful it is to have your monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul.

Ask me what I am least in the mood to eat when I wake up in the throes of jet lag, and I will tell you fish, rice, and a discolored, fermented weeks-old egg.

Ideally, in a person who is adjusted to the local time zone, the body’s circadian rhythms behave as follows: •​Melatonin secretion peaks at night and decreases throughout the day. •​Cortisol levels peak in the morning and decrease throughout the day. •​Core body temperature reaches its lowest peak in the middle of the night and rises throughout the day. •​Clock genes promote activity in the daytime and recovery during the night. In a jet-lagged body, these rhythms get mixed up because the external environment has changed and the internal rhythms haven’t had a chance to catch up. Rises in core temperature at night will cause premature wakening; melatonin secretion throughout the day will cause daytime sleepiness, and, as we know, lack of sleep is responsible for a large handful of common jet-lag symptoms.

a teoria de jet lag de Damien está correta: que sua alma mortal ficou a léguas de distância e está sendo rebobinada por algum cordão umbilical fantasma seguindo a trilha já desaparecida do avião que a levou até ali, a centenas de milhares de pés de altura sobre o Atlântico.

Some days she slouched for endless hours on the sofa, yawning hugely, like someone suffering from terrible jet lag.

The first point to remember is that if you are travelling west to east then the jet lag will be worse than if you were going from east to west. Just remember: "West is best, east is a beast". The reason for this is because our internal body clocks are a little longer than 24 hours, so it is easier for us to stay up longer than it is to fall asleep earlier than we are use to.

I always tell travel writing students to use these early hours to explore, because one’s surroundings—the colorful drinks, the melodic sirens, the sweet-and-foul smells—will not be as clear or as sharp in a few days. At the start, everything stands out as if in high definition, especially, strangely, if you’re groggy from jet lag or insomnia.

Jet lag had a habit of turning her into her mother, a high school librarian with a quiet drinking problem. If only my mother had been a college librarian, she thought. Then I would have had a real shot at the right ideas.

The numbers connecting smoking with social jet lag are striking: among those who suffer less than an hour of social jet lag per day, we find 15 to 20 percent are smokers. This percentage systematically rises to over 60 percent when internal and external time are more than five hours out of synch.