[Vanessa] I'm sure you've all experienced jet lag before.
Right now it's 11am, a good time to get out of bed!
But I've been awake for 6 and a half hours already!
Since 4:30.
I'm jetlagged.
I'm tired, cranky, and my internal body clock is totally out of sync with my new time zone.
Studies have shown that people experiencing jet lag have trouble learning and recalling
memories.
Or something.
But there some life hacks to getting over jet lag, fast.
A study came out this week saying that jet lag is simply a math problem that you can
solve by controlling your exposure to light, and darkness.
[Olivia] Jet lag is a question that comes out of biological rhythms, which are the coolest.
It's like a math problem.
My name is Olivia Walch, I'm a graduate student in applied math at the University of Michigan.
[Vanessa] You've probably heard of Circadian Rhythms
before, the roughly 24-hour biological rhythms that influence when you sleep and wake up.
Olivia developed a schedule of exposure to light and darkness that allows your circadian
rhythm to adjust to new time zones as quickly as possible.
And she figured this out by thinking of us as robots.
[Olivia] It's using an algorithm that was originally
developed by engineers for robots, to figure out how to drive a system from one point to
another.
[Vanessa] Here this system is your circadian clock.
Think of it as having a point at the hour where your body temperature is the lowest.
Your alertness and body temperature parallel each other.
[Olivia] When it's rising you're becoming more alert,
when it's falling, getting close to the bottom, you're less alert.
[Vanessa]
Usually you experience peak drowsiness and your body is at it's lowest temperature a
few hours before your alarm goes off.
When you travel to a new time zone, this point shifts to, say, 3pm in the afternoon and that's
why you feel jet lagged.
You can speed up the process of entrainment - the scientific term for fully adjusting
to a new time zone - by timing your exposure to light.
In your eyes, cells sense light and send that information to your brain's internal clock.
To adjust the clock, you have to experience one block of the brightest light and one block
of the dimmest darkness each day.
All you really have to worry about is dawn and dusk—when you first start getting light
and when you stop getting it.
For example, if you travel from New York to London, on the first day you should begin
light at 7.58am and begin dark at 8.14pm.
On day 2, expose yourself to light at 6.18am and avoid light at 7.53pm.
On day 3, lights on at 6.01am.
But you don't have to do the calculations yourself.
There's an app for that.
[Vanessa] The reason why I've been up since 4:30 is
because this app, Entrain, told me to get up!
[Olivia] It's available in the Apple Store, since like
I was the only one writing it we haven't got an Andriod version yet, but I started that
today.
[Vanessa] So you can use the app to see your light and
dark schedules that work to adjust your body clock to a new time zone.
And you can help science.
You can submit your data back to Olivia to help make the app and her research better.
You can tell her how you felt, what worked and how long it took you to get over your
jet lag.
[Olivia] This is a Circadian study on a huge scale
that I don't think has ever been done before.
[Vanessa] So I'm outside getting some light and I think
I've pretty much adjusted from LA to Sydney time after about 4 days.
Let me know in the comments what you think of Entrain, if you've downloaded it or if
there are any other body hacks that you use to get over jet lag fast.
And if you haven't already, subscribe to BrainCraft!
I'll have another episode on sleep out in two weeks from today so don't miss out on
that.
It will be in my normal crafty style so I promise I won't vlog too much.