Sleepless in {enter city}

Jet lag and the travel writer, oh the places I will be tossing around all night in. And some tips in case you're interested.

I wrote about my insomnia experience at a sleep program a while ago, but as I get off six months of non-stop travel and the jet lag hits me once more, I hauled it out to reflect on it a little more.

Plus I am thinking of doing this sleep program in Grenada with the Six Senses. And wondering about how travel and sleep affects us so much. The brain is inflamed and sleep knits and heals it. So, sleep is probably (besides for diet) one of the most important things we can do for ourselves. ZZZzzz

Taylor Swift joked that ‘jet lag is a choice’ - but Tay Tay! - and now she has me wondering how to better deal with my constant travel jet lag. Because let me tell you, people ask me about it every day of the week.

SO! You’d think the travel writer who’s on the road 250 days a year crossing time zones has some hack so he can sleep perfectly - like my husband who is 100 % unaffected - but alas, I do not.

Jet lag is a form of circadian misalignment - meaning your body clock is out of sync with your current time zone (or where the sun is in the sky). So where are your tips Daniel I hear you say, well, I think what might work for you may not work for me, and others.

But I did read this week that scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered the secret to regulating our internal clock. Published in the journal PNAS, they identified that “this regulator sits right at the tail end of Casein Kinase 1 delta (CK1δ), a protein which acts as a pace setter for our internal biological clock or the natural 24-hour cycles that control sleep-wake patterns and other daily functions, known as circadian rhythm. CK1δ regulates circadian rhythms by tagging other proteins involved in our biological clock to fine-tune the timing of these rhythms. In addition to modifying other proteins, CK1δ itself can be tagged, thereby altering its own ability to regulate the proteins involved in running the body’s internal clock.”

Which might just lead to some new practical solutions soon.

But seriously, how soon because I am pretty jet lagged right now actually? Could the Science Kids step this up a touch pretty please?

Remember when President Biden blamed his bad debate performance on jet lag? I mean, I almost ALMOST half sympathized with what he was saying. But that was not the full picture, obviously. So never mind that. #KAMALA

Just this week my sleep was so illusive I worried I had stopped making any sense.

So I stayed at a gorgeous hotel in Paris, La Fantaisie and they put a little CBD-Melatonin pill package on your bed with turn down. Did it help me? Nope, I was up in the night watching “Red, White and Royal Blue.” Then I was in Las Vegas speaking at IMEX all week and every night at like 3am I would be up and going for a run on The Strip with the homeless folk, the drunk party-goers and a bunch of others that I guess were maybe lost (or watching the famous Tropicana get demolished). The friend (but not a doctor) who I hung out with all week told me all about her sleep hacks - a little low dose of lithium she suggested. So perhaps I can try that next. And then I found this little helpful kit from FOUNT BIO that says it can prevent jet lag with their custom supplements, specialized glasses, and an AI-driven app. I shall keep you posted on when I use it and how that goes.

And then as I silly-sorry-sully-sleeplessly sat waiting for my flight back home a group of refugees fresh off the Middle East came to sit next to me; a number of families all traveling together with a bunch of little kids running around. We chatted a little, about their lives and their journey to America. They also hadn’t slept. They were embracing their extra awareness and hyper awakeness in this new world where they found themselves for the first time. And I guess my sleeplessness seemed silly to me in that moment, like it didn’t quite matter. But we bonded over this sleeplessness, and that certainly did matter.

Back to this ditty I wrote a few years ago when I absolutely had some kind of travel induced insomnia. Just in case you needed some motivation to get your sleep under control:

I was a sleeper, my Mum used to say. She would proudly tell me that I slept through the night my entire childhood, taking extended naps at any time of the day with very little encouragement. 

Oh, how things changed, Mum! Somewhere along the line, I lost the knack for shut eye, and for the last few months, my eyes never really shut. Not once, I tell you! Well, perhaps once or twice, the top and bottom lids actually touched for more than the obligatory split second, but in my delusional state of sleeplessness, I couldn’t differentiate between states. 

Insomnia. In-som-nia-a. Innn-soooom-niii-aaaa. I mouthed the word constantly— to worried friends, to extended family, to the dog, to the pharmacist with his insincere side smile—and over and over to myself. It sounded the way it felt; like hell. And I was right there, fully awake and sitting straight up in my United Polaris seat. 

Forget the silly stories of counting sheep (I ran out of numbers I could handle) and drinking endless Sleepy Time teas. I was never going to sleep again. It left me in a dark mood, and I wished for Mother—not my own dearest Mum but Mother Death! I longed for her inevitable visit. 

She did not come, and I was forced to look for solutions. Google recommended a sleep clinic in Cape Town that included a handy website assessment. Who was I to argue, this as the next best thing so I drove myself right over to the clinic with no appointment and probably not enough in my weekender bag. I was checked in by someone that looked like a classic nurse at this Sleep Clinic in the midst of forests and suburbia. She wasn’t even ironic about it – white coat, strange heat gear and some horn-rimmed glasses. I requested to be put to sleep if not forever “Sleeping Beauty” style at least for a while. 

Nope, still the jetlag. Still the no sleeping thing.

It’s a professional establishment so after thorough assessments my various doctors in starched coats the horrible sounding “acute insomnia” was left sticking all over me. Of course, I had to sign endless indemnity forms but all I really wanted was to sleep so I signed happily and waited for the best. Sleep, and sleep some more, were the only options for me even if they had to put me to sleep with a needle in my arm. My usual enmity to drugs was arm wrestled and defeated. 

The calm came before the sleep, a gentle sense that everything was going to be totally ok. As I watched the world slip away from me and waited for the awakened state to mutate into something I had forgotten all about, I understood that Scotsman Macbeth who famously spoke of “Innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.” 

What may have been a week (or month, but not years) later the urge to open my eyes is what woke me up. But in fact it was just two days but somehow this jump-started the sleep of all sleeps. As I woke up I was ready for another nap, and a few minutes later I had a nap just because I could. Perhaps this was not a cure, but if the napping was anything to go on we were in business. 

Life was visible, yet again. Blood was red and under my skin, air was inside me, taste was in my mouth, the world had been inverted and was now the right way around. Oh, how I had forgotten what that was like! 

Once color came back, the other senses wanted to follow, they want to be as much part of the experience. I wanted to eat too much, drink gallons of water, spray oodles of perfume and touch my skin over and over. The simplicity of being awake, after having slept, finally, slept!

Once I’d slept, I knew it would come again. It was no longer out of reach. It was mine again. Sleep was no longer the enemy - it was now my lover, my friend, my rodeo.

And now it was time to go home to sleep some more. 

In case you still want some jet lag tips from the travel writer, I shall jot some down right below. But who knows if any of these really work. Sometimes I have had success, and then at times none of this worked for me at all. But hey, worth trying right?

• White noise it out: try some head phones and play some white noise that might just lull you to sleep, sometimes it becomes meditative and trance like. WIN! Try Better Sleep. Also there are sleep assist apps - like Timeshifter - that you can try also.

• Adjust your light exposure before you leave: more light in the evening and less in the morning if you’re going west, and more light in the morning and less in the evening if you’re heading east. This could sync you up.

• The Moment you land get your side right outside. This has helped me. I immediately go to some specialty coffee place or go for a run, or both. You need to get out and get fresh air. It does your whole being good.

• Travel prepared: sometimes hotels have black out curtains, quiet rooms available and good pillows and cool temperatures yes. But if they do not, come prepared so you can create that environment. You will need to do the work a little and ask the hotel before hand or at check in, but all this helps. I travel with little sticky dots to put on bright lights from tech stuff in hotel rooms. Actually where are those things.

• Weed gummies, mushrooms, melatonin, lithium (light low dose) or anything else like this. I mean I have tried all of these things - not Ambien - and sometimes hey they have worked!

• I am sure there is science to support this, but drink more water than usual.

The FT is right, we should have fixed jet lag by now.

But because the body takes about a day for every one hour timezone change, things can get hairy at times. I have noticed that both the 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350 are a little bit better because of their better cabin pressure and humidity. Plus Singapore Airlines has a set of recommendations that all sound very rational and worth trying. And I have often written about wellness in the skies, so I am excited to see that airlines are trying to assist more:

Like, Qantas (of course because any flight to Australia is pretty far) that has launched their new advanced jumbo jet with features to help with jet lag, including a "Wellbeing Zone" for workouts, specially designed seats, meals, and lighting. I haven’t tried it yet, but soon. The University of Sydney got involved too - so let’s see how this all turns out. I shall report back…In the meantime I shall read my book and hopefully drift off to a little nap.