How Do You Conquer Jet Lag?

I open my eyes, suddenly awake in the pitch black darkness of the night. I roll over and check my phone. It’s 3am and I’ve only been asleep for four hours. I roll back over and bury my head into my pillow. I toss and turn for the next hour, but it’s no use. I’m wide awake. I rub my tired eyes and hop out of bed. I start work at 2pm and finish at 10pm today. It is going to be a long day.

This was my life for the first few days since I got back to Australia from Europe. I had terrible jet lag and I couldn’t shake it. Whenever I go on a trip that takes me across lots of time zones, it seems to take me about a week to recover and get back into my normal sleeping schedule. My general cure for jet lag when I get to my destination is to try and stay awake that night, go to bed at a decent hour and hope to sleep through the night, kicking my body clock into the new time zone. It doesn’t seem to be that easy, and my body seems to just get confused about what I am doing to it. For some reason it is also worse when I come home, rather than when I get to my holiday destination.

My body clock’s reaction to the time difference doesn’t even really make any sense. Paris, where I flew out from in Europe, is 8 hours behind the East coast of Australia. I am waking up at 3am, which makes it 7pm in Paris. No wonder my body is confused!

It is now a week later and, I think mostly due to exhaustion, my body is now finally starting to readjust, and although I still wake up in the early hours of the morning, I was able to go back to sleep until 8am this morning. I still feel like going to sleep by about 8pm, but I’m getting there.

There must be a quicker way to make my body beat the jet lag and adjust to a new timezone, but I’m yet to find it, so I’m asking you. What are your methods and remedies for conquering jet lag? Do you suffer from it like me, or do you adjust easily? Share you thoughts in the comments below.