Nocte Guides

How to beat jet lag

Jet lag is not tiredness, and you do not fix it by sleeping more. It is the gap between what your body clock thinks the time is and what the clock on the wall says, and the lever that moves a body clock is light — when you get it, and when you avoid it. Everything else on this page is downstream of that one fact.

Why east is harder than west

Left to itself, the human body clock runs a little longer than 24 hours. That small asymmetry decides the whole experience of travel. Flying west asks you to stay up later and get up later, which is the direction your clock already drifts, so it usually feels manageable. Flying east asks you to fall asleep earlier than your body believes it should, which is the one thing willpower cannot do.

This is why the same six-hour shift can feel trivial in one direction and brutal in the other, and why advice that ignores direction is not much use.

The light rules

• Going east (Europe from the US, Asia from Europe): you need your clock to move earlier. Seek morning light at your destination and avoid bright light in the late evening.
• Going west (the US from Europe): you need your clock to move later. Get light in the late afternoon and evening, and avoid being blasted with it too early in the morning.
• Avoiding light is half the job. This is the part people skip. Blocking light at the wrong hours is as much of a lever as seeking it at the right ones, and it is the part you can control in a hotel room with thin curtains, on a plane with the blinds up, or at 5am in a room facing east.

The direction of adjustment flips for very large shifts, and getting light at exactly the wrong time can push your clock the wrong way, so for eight-plus zones it is worth reading the detail in the sources below rather than improvising.

Before you go

• Shift by an hour a day for two or three days if you can. Earlier for eastward trips, later for westward. It will not do the whole job, but arriving one or two zones adjusted is meaningfully easier than arriving cold.
• Set your watch to destination time at the gate. Trivial, and it changes the decisions you make on board.
• For trips under about three days, don’t adjust at all. Stay on home time and schedule around it. Adjusting and then re-adjusting costs more than it saves.

On the plane

One rule covers most of it: sleep only if it is night where you are going. A cabin is a hard place to follow that, because it is designed around the airline’s schedule rather than yours — lights come up for meals, blinds go up over daylight, and the person beside you is watching something bright.

So the practical version is: if you should be sleeping, make it as dark as you can and give yourself something steady to listen to over the engine drone. If you should be awake, keep the blind up and stay awake, however unpleasant. This is the honest case for taking a mask on a flight — not comfort, but control over the one input that actually moves your clock. Ours folds into a travel case and runs 15 hours on a charge, which covers a long-haul and the night you land; a plain contoured eye mask does the light half fine if you do not need the sound.

When you land

• Get outside. Outdoor light on an overcast day is still far brighter than indoor lighting, and it is the strongest signal available.
• Eat on local time. Meal timing is a weaker cue than light but it is not nothing, and it is easy to get right.
• Nap carefully or not at all. If you must, keep it to about 20 minutes and early in the day — the reasoning is in how to nap. A three-hour collapse at 6pm on day one undoes the day.
• Make the room genuinely dark. Hotel curtains are famously bad, and an unfamiliar room at 5am with a strip of daylight across it will end your night early.
• Expect roughly a day per zone. Faster westward. Knowing the number stops you concluding on day two that something is wrong.

Common questions

Where a mask fits, and where it doesn’t

Blocking light at the right hours is a genuine part of adjusting, and a mask is the only version of that you can carry. It is not a treatment for jet lag, there is no product that is, and anything sold as one is overselling. If you cross time zones constantly for work and it has stopped being a nuisance and started being a problem, that is worth raising with a doctor. The Nocte Quiet Night Kit is a comfort product: a blackout mask with masking sound, a travel case, and 60 nights to decide.

Nocte is a comfort product, not a medical device. It doesn’t diagnose, treat, cure, or reduce tinnitus or any other condition. It plays sound many people find makes the ringing easier to ignore at night.