A traveller's guide to beating jet lag

Is your internal clock in another time zone? Here's how to bring it home.

The jet lag never hits when it’s convenient. Not at the airport, not in the taxi to the hotel when you’re thinking, ah, I could nap, and definitely not even on the first evening when you’re still running on arrival adrenaline and the novelty of a new city and a minibar you are definitely not going to touch. No, it arrives at 2am on day two, fully alert and inexplicably hungry, staring at a ceiling in a room you have to think about for a second before you remember which country you’re in.

For those of us who city-hop within India regularly, there’s a version of this that doesn’t get enough airtime; here, the flights are short enough that you can’t really sleep, long enough to be disruptive, and the time difference is zero, which should mean that nothing changes, but somehow everything still feels slightly… off. Land in Delhi from Mumbai at 10pm after a full day of meetings, and try to sleep in a hotel room at 11. The body is confused, but in a low-grade way. Now multiply that by three cities in four days, which is a week that certain people reading this will find extremely familiar, and you arrive home feeling like you have been somewhere much further away.

Then there is actual international travel, and whoopsadaisy, that is a different situation entirely. Your body has a clock, and it hates crossing time zones. The circadian rhythm is controlled by a tiny cluster of cells in the brain roughly the size of a grain of rice, and it governs everything: when cortisol rises to wake you, when melatonin arrives to send you to sleep, when you feel sharp or foggy, hungry or not. When you fly across time zones this system doesn’t update the way your phone does. It keeps running on the schedule you left behind, which is why you’re wide awake at midnight and falling asleep face-first into your croissant at breakfast, and why eight hours of sleep in the wrong window won’t feel like eight hours because the deep, restorative stages of it are the first to go. Long-haul travel also increases inflammation in the body, which is where that dull, heavy, can’t-shake-it feeling actually comes from. The minibar raid at 4am, meanwhile, is just your hunger signals going completely rogue.

This is your simple checklist to still feel good:

The single fastest reset available to you is morning light in your new time zone, and nothing else you do will come close to matching it.

Get outside within an hour or two of waking, let the light reach your eyes (sunglasses defeat the purpose, save them for later), and stay out for ten to twenty minutes. Natural daylight suppresses melatonin and signals the brain that the day has truly begun. This one intervention alone can shift your internal clock by several hours, and it costs nothing, which feels almost offensive given how much the wellness industry has tried to make jet lag complicated.

Eat on local time from the moment you land, even if you have no appetite, because your gut has its own clock and mealtimes are powerful anchors for the whole system.

Move your body in the morning, even if it’s the last thing you want to do, because it raises cortisol appropriately and clears that heavy, foggy feeling in a way that lying in bed definitely will not.

Go easy on the caffeine: it helps in the first half of the day and actively works against you after 2pm, delaying melatonin release and keeping you stuck in the lag even when you feel desperate for it.

Need a lift in the afternoon? A short walk. Yes, this is annoyingly simple advice. Even more annoying: it works, and be silly to ignore it.

For the advanced planners, shifting your sleep and wake times by thirty to sixty minutes in the right direction for two or three days before international travel makes the first forty-eight hours considerably less brutal. It costs nothing but a little effort and the mild social inconvenience of going to bed at 9pm the night before a flight.

For the city-hoppers

The domestic version responds well to the same interventions, scaled down.

Morning light on arrival, eating at local mealtimes even when your body is petitioning for a meal at 11pm, and the thing that helps most and gets ignored most: not catching up on everything the moment you land. The laptop can wait forty-five minutes. Go outside first. Your inbox will still be catastrophic when you get back, but you will be slightly better equipped to face it.

Jet lag resolves on its own, but it can take a week or more, which is a significant chunk of most trips and approximately all of a domestic work sprint. Morning light, local mealtimes, movement, and sensible caffeine are not difficult things to implement; they don’t require a supplement stack or a special sleep programme, they just require doing them in the right order at the right time. Which leaves you with considerably more cognitive function to actually be wherever you went.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com