What if you could take away the jet lag that dampens your holiday joy, or makes a long business trip even worse?
Well, scientists are working on solutions to the problems that jet lag causes – including fatigue and sleep troubles. Now, new research reveals fresh insight into how to reduce its impacts.
Jet lag is caused by the body’s internal clock, known as the circadian system, adjusting to new time zones. We each have many internal clocks, which are present in almost every cell and tissue in our bodies. When these get out of sync, the problems start.
In the new study, scientists from Northwestern University and Santa Fe Institute, USA, investigated how these clocks calibrate, respond to different signals, and sync up again.
So what did they find? The answer to those groggy mornings or sleepless nights is in your stomach. According to the research published in the journal Chaos, managing your meals will help you overcome jet lag in three key steps:
- Have a large breakfast earlier in the morning of your new time zone, and make this the biggest meal of the day.
- Avoid shifting your meal times too much.
- Avoiding a meal at night.
Our internal clocks calibrate via different signals. For example, the brain’s clock responds to the Sun’s light, while the clocks of peripheral organs – such as nerves – depend on meal times.
If we send the wrong signals to these places, the clocks become confused. This includes going somewhere hot (or the weather being unusually warm) when your body is in winter mode – or eating at the time you would usually go to sleep.
The symptoms of jet lag worsen as you age due to weaker signals between the circadian clocks and your lower sensitivity to light. The study found that these impacts make the circadian system more vulnerable to disruption and less capable of recovery.
Little is known about the way our internal clocks interact with each other. “Most studies primarily focus on one particular time cue or a single clock,” said study author Yitong Huang. “Important gaps remain in our understanding of the synchronisation of multiple clocks under conflicting time cues.”
That’s why Huang and her colleagues built a mathematical model of these complex interactions, mimicking natural rhythms of circadian cycles. Using data from past research, the model combines what the scientists know about how food and light impact various body clocks. The scientists then inputted disruptive factors, like lower light levels, to see how the system gets thrown off balance and which factors made it worse.
In the future, they hope to use this model to discover how we can make our clocks more resilient. This could provide the answer to stopping jet lag altogether. It could also give insight into how we can keep our internal clocks healthy as we get older.
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