If Time Travel Were Possible, How Bad Would the Jet Lag Be?
Travel between time zones really messes with your head and more.
I arrived back in Portugal yesterday — at least, I think it was yesterday, but right now, I am unsure what “yesterday” was. Was it at all? As an experienced traveler whose top year was 120,000 miles (99 flights on Lufthansa and a dinosaur-sized carbon footprint) before COVID-19, there is still really no way to get used to jet lag.
People tell you that by taking melatonin supplements, you can get the body back onto a normal sleeping cycle. Still, I don’t like to mess with the body’s inner workings that way — my enjoyment of beer and wine is enough of a “chemical influence” that I need, so I prefer to forego such tablets.
The psychological and physiological effects of skating unnoticed to the world across multiple time zones while confined in a jet plane (“Leaving on a Jet Plane” is such a wonderful song!) is something that has messed up sleep, eating, and other body patterns for nearly 100 years now. Zombified, travelers exit planes in places like Frankfurt — where I had my layover yesterday — at times when every cell in our bodies is screaming, “Yo, dude! Why are you not sleeping?!”
As I stumbled to the business lounge yesterday, a leftover from my former heavy-traveling years, it was 3:30 a.m. Denver time. The lounge was serving lunch. I had a wonderful bowl of onion soup and lots of water. With time on my hands and a non-functioning internet in the lounge, I decided to take a restorative shower. It worked until I got onto the next flight to Portugal. That flight was oddly filled with mostly the same people who had flown with me from Denver. It was a plane filled with sleep-deprived passengers struggling to understand the new sensations that jetlag springs upon us.
It is like riding on a rollercoaster with your eyes blindfolded. You never know what will happen next or how your body or mind will react to the subsequent lack of or too much of at the wrong hour. Body: Why are you drinking a coffee now? By the way, they say coffee and alcohol should be avoided to speed up the passing of jetlag — the people who say that aren’t travelers. Maybe your body doesn’t need those things, but your mind does. There is nothing like a hot coffee at Starbucks or a cold can of beer to make you think things are normal again.
Nonetheless, after getting home and in my zombified state, dropping a bottle of sesame oil I bought at King Soopers in Denver, resulting in a shattered bottle — the whole apartment now smells deliciously like an Asian restaurant — I ate a dinner my body didn’t want, drank tea and then bid my family good night. I figured mine would be a long one. I have found that holding out until the last possible moment before going to bed is the best strategy for the first night back.
I lasted until 11:30 p.m. local time (2:30 p.m. Denver time) and then fell into a deep, sound sleep — for three hours. I woke up feeling restored, and my body and brain said, “Yo, let’s go. Let’s get to work.”
Fighting through the excess energy, my body again slipped into a comfort zone. “Ah, yes, this is a bed and not a chair in a plane. Sweet.” My brain, however, was zooming! As I often do when I need to calm my brain, I travel back in time and focus on the details of that era.
Lately, I have been traveling back to slave cabins in the Deep South of the United States. I talk with the slaves and listen to their stories, then I go and wake up the startled enslavers and punish them for their sins. Last night, as I lay there and listened to a slave woman talk about how the owner would get drunk, wake the slaves at night, and make them stand out in the rain for hours just to mess with them, I found myself dozing. I apologized to my imagined slave friend — whom I always lead to freedom — for falling asleep while she was sharing such terrible things with me.
“It’s jetlag,” I explained. “I have traveled back from hundreds of years in the future. My body is out of whack.”
Then, as my body fought to adjust to a mere seven-hour difference in time, I tried to imagine what a jetlag experience of a couple hundred years would be like. Thankful for the seven-hour clip, I fell asleep deeply and awoke only at 9 a.m.
I don’t even want to imagine how a journey back in time would mess up our body patterns.