Travel

Crossing time zones is the one part of a long journey that carries on after you land. Your body keeps the schedule it left home with, and left alone it re-adjusts at roughly an hour a day, which is why a five-hour shift can shadow most of a week's holiday.

How to Beat Jet Lag is the practical starting point: what light exposure, sleep timing and meals actually do, and in what order to use them. Best Sleep Strategies Before Long Flights moves that work into the days before departure, where it is far easier, and Why Flying East Causes Worse Jet Lag Than Flying West explains why the same number of hours costs more in one direction than the other. The remaining two guides deal with the paperwork of travel rather than the body: reading flight times and crossing the International Date Line.

Guides in this section (5)

How to Beat Jet Lag What jet lag actually is, and how light, sleep and meal timing shorten it instead of leaving you to wait it out.
Best Sleep Strategies Before Long Flights Shifting your body clock in the days before departure so you land closer to local time than to the one you left.
Understanding Flight Times Across Time Zones Why a ticket can show an arrival earlier than the departure, and how to read a schedule as elapsed hours rather than clock times.
Why Flying East Causes Worse Jet Lag Than Flying West The body clock runs slightly long, which makes losing hours harder than gaining them. What that means for an eastbound trip.
Crossing the International Date Line: What Happens to Your Travel Day Losing a calendar day or living the same one twice, what it does to bookings and connections, and how to plan around it.

Other guide sections

This is one of 8 sections in the library. The others cover Time Zones, Daylight Saving Time (DST), Business & Remote Work, Interesting Facts, City Comparison, Country Guides and Time & Astronomy. The guides index lists every article we have published in one place.