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MATHEMATICIANS have developed a smartphone app they claim will help travellers to overcome jet lag as quickly as possible.
The downside is that you may be required to haul yourself on to a foreign street at 5am to achieve maximum exposure to daylight, and then place yourself under a 7pm curfew.
Danny Forger, the mathematician at the University of Michigan who devised the algorithm, said: “Overcoming jet lag is fundamentally a math problem, and we’ve calculated the optimal way of doing it.”
The resultant smartphone app, Entrain, provides customised schedules for the first few days of a trip, instructing the user when to seek out the brightest light and when to draw the curtains.
The recommendations may be distinctly anti-social, but Professor Forger says that sticking to the timetable can halve the length of time spent in a zombie-like state.
For those taking a business trip from New York to London, which is five hours ahead, the app promises to shift your body clock within three days — less than the rule of thumb of one day for every hour your body clock is shifted.
To achieve this, on the day after arrival you are advised to get light from 7.40am until about 9pm, and not after this. On the second day, you are required to rise at 6.20am and turn out the lights at 7.40pm.
You may feel like going for an evening walk or meeting friends for a drink, but doing so would spoil the schedule.
On the third day, you should get up before sunrise, about 5am, and stay in the light until 7.20pm, at which point you should retreat to a dark, or at least dim, environment. “You don’t have to be asleep,’’ the scientists say. The following day, in theory, you will be fully adjusted.
Previously, scientists have found that fasting on your flight and then adopting local meal-times speeds recovery from jet lag, because the brain has a “feeding clock” that has a powerful impact on the sleep-wake cycle. The traditional solution, coffee, also helps.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...-to-beat-jet-lag/story-fnb64oi6-1226881424190
The downside is that you may be required to haul yourself on to a foreign street at 5am to achieve maximum exposure to daylight, and then place yourself under a 7pm curfew.
Danny Forger, the mathematician at the University of Michigan who devised the algorithm, said: “Overcoming jet lag is fundamentally a math problem, and we’ve calculated the optimal way of doing it.”
The resultant smartphone app, Entrain, provides customised schedules for the first few days of a trip, instructing the user when to seek out the brightest light and when to draw the curtains.
The recommendations may be distinctly anti-social, but Professor Forger says that sticking to the timetable can halve the length of time spent in a zombie-like state.
For those taking a business trip from New York to London, which is five hours ahead, the app promises to shift your body clock within three days — less than the rule of thumb of one day for every hour your body clock is shifted.
To achieve this, on the day after arrival you are advised to get light from 7.40am until about 9pm, and not after this. On the second day, you are required to rise at 6.20am and turn out the lights at 7.40pm.
You may feel like going for an evening walk or meeting friends for a drink, but doing so would spoil the schedule.
On the third day, you should get up before sunrise, about 5am, and stay in the light until 7.20pm, at which point you should retreat to a dark, or at least dim, environment. “You don’t have to be asleep,’’ the scientists say. The following day, in theory, you will be fully adjusted.
Previously, scientists have found that fasting on your flight and then adopting local meal-times speeds recovery from jet lag, because the brain has a “feeding clock” that has a powerful impact on the sleep-wake cycle. The traditional solution, coffee, also helps.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...-to-beat-jet-lag/story-fnb64oi6-1226881424190
