For the coast-to-coast jet lag, it could definitely take that long to adjust if you take a redeye heading east.
Age and other factors can influence how long it takes somebody to adjust, too.
Actually, completely changing tones: my mom suffers horribly from jet lag - like she's disoriented and foggy - and has had huge success with fasting (for like a full 24 hours) before flying.
I'm irritated about the underlying story, and choosing to over-focus on this one detail, but I don't actually have a bone to pick about how people can be so weird on time adjustments.
Babies and those who care for them are frequently not very rational.
I have a hard time adjusting to daylight savings and jet lag too, but it mainly manifests as the occasional migraine and rough sleep for a week or so. But I fully acknowledge that my sleep patterns/ways are weird.
And that I'm overly set in my ways, and really like schedules and routines and other vaguely OCD things.
A three-hour time difference just doesn't seem like enough to bother me at all. Sometimes it makes it slightly hard to sleep at the right time, but so can drinking caffeine at the wrong hour.
Coming back from Europe can affect me for a couple weeks, though. I wake up really early in the morning and feel like I have extra productive hours and it's pretty great. Going to Europe, weirdly, doesn't seem to have much of an effect; I'm tired the day I land and then after that I feel normal.
A couple of months from now I'm going to Asia for the first time, so I'm curious how that will go. (Also, totally dreading the long flight.)
Coming back from Europe can affect me for a couple weeks, though. I wake up really early in the morning and feel like I have extra productive hours and it's pretty great. Going to Europe, weirdly, doesn't seem to have much of an effect; I'm tired the day I land and then after that I feel normal.
This does seem backwards - flying east compresses your day, and flying west extends your day, so I thought conventional wisdom was that west is the easy direction.
Oh wait, you're saying flying west is really awesome and flying east is negligible. Carry on.
When we went to Germany on our honeymoon we were weirdly crabby and sleepy for the first several days and couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. I think it took us nearly a week to figure out it was jet lag; we weren't expecting it, for some reason.
I've had good results by basically toughing it out. The theory is that the problem is that your circadian rhythms are wrong for your location, and the longer you stay that way, the worse it will be because you'll be increasingly tired. The practice: get straight into the local pattern as soon as you arrive, come what may. You'll feel dreadful for the first day, but reap the reward later.
we weren't expecting it, for some reason
Because aging sneaks up on you!
That's what I try to do. The first day or so going east is awful, but then it's pretty much fine. West is a little weird, and lasts for a while, but never terrible.
Melatonin helps, especially if you need to fall asleep earlier than you're body expects.
I adjust to a 6 hour shift with little difficulty. One or two hours is a bit irritating, though. It's just enough to feel like a disturbed version of the normal rhythm, which makes it harder somehow.
As I understand it, the standard answer is one day per hour difference. This has generally matched my experience - sometimes it's easier, but rarely worse. A day per hour difference is a generous estimate.
I have to be told about the time zone changes or I don't even notice them.
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Vanity Fair says there has been no cultural progress in the last twenty years, mostly because of economic stagnation. Damn kids are slacking on my lawn, wearing my old clothes.
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For the record, the person in the OP is four.
14: Yeah. It's been no big deal either way. I note some increased checking of clocks to see how they match my subjective time of day but it's hardly a problem.
I tough it out and immediately start living according to the new time, I take melatonin, etc, etc. I think it's just like how some people are good sleepers and some people are bad ones; bodies are different.
Aw man. I think jet lag has gotten worse for me as I've aged. My last two trips, which were ten or eleven hours difference, I was just fucked up. Lasted for days.
I notice a bit of an effect for daylight savings but I wouldn't panic for a week over it.
It seems to be totally random whether I'll have big jet lag problems or not. Trips between the same places sometime leaves me totally fine, and sometimes screw me up for a week.
I used to have a terrible time with flights to Europe but finally figured out that light cues help a whole lot. Just for the first night or two, I leave the curtains open to get natural light at the right local time, and my body clock says (I paraphrase) oh that's what time it is. And then everything is fine.
It was interesting flying from the west coast to New Zealand because it's a 10 hour flight, but at the time of year I was flying only 3 hours time difference. I was still jet lagged, which shows that some of the affect is the traveling not the time change. It was a way bigger affect than flying east coast to west coast has ever been.
It seems to be totally random whether I'll have big jet lag problems or not. Trips between the same places sometime leaves me totally fine, and sometimes screw me up for a week.
This is basically true for me. When I was regularly flying cross country -- 4-5 times per month -- sometimes it would hit very hard, sometimes not. It did lead to a general feeling of being disoriented and not quite "there" wherever you are, and left me with a lingering visceral negative reaction to air travel.
Daylight savings time is odd. I barely noticed it at all for my entire life, but the past two years it's been a big deal -- several days to a week of disoriented feeling (is it night? day? what is going on?). I'm not sure what it is; maybe it's age, but I have a theory that lengthening daylight savings time so much has made the transition feel much more extreme.
Coming back from Europe can affect me for a couple weeks, though.
This is me too. My last trip, I was seriously fucked up for a good month after I got back (not helped at all by the fact that I was going back to a job I was seriously burnt out on). For a while there I was actually concerned that I'd started to suffer some kind of permanent cognitive damage, but luckily it finally sorted itself out.
So if it's a 12 hour difference and you have a choice you should fly west instead of east because the transition will be easier.
I notice east coast/west coast jet lag, but I've been a student with a terrible sleep schedule so much of my life that it hasn't been a big deal. And when I have flown to/while working, I don't remember it being an issue either. When I'm on a schedule, I'll always wake up at the same time, but I'll routinely go to sleep a night or two every week 1-3 hours later than whatever might be my normal.
Going to Europe, however, was almost always a problem and that was even with being a lot younger back then. It didn't help that more than half the time I'd catch a cold immediately on arrival. Counter to most advice I've seen, I found that sleeping as soon as I could - which, in a hostel environment usually meant not getting to the room until after 4 - and then getting up at a normal time the next day was better than any alternative. Somehow I avoided the problem of waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to sleep.
For the record, the person in the OP is four.
So, do you think the kid was faking it just to get attention or something, or that the parents somehow made it a big deal?
To the last part of the OP, it took me shockingly long to adjust to the end of DST this year, but that's because, for the first time in my life, I'm waking up at a fairly consistent time every day, such that even on weekends I open my eyes around 7:20.
But I don't think anyone else in the family was thrown for more than a day or two, if that.
I've got an understanding doctor, and ambien does the trick for going East. Coming back West rocks for me - it synchs me up with the first shift world, at least for a couple days. If I lived with no outside awareness I suspect I'd sleep and awake an hour or two later every day.
I've been waiting for someone to speed up the slowing down of the world's rotation.
I have a theory that lengthening daylight savings time so much has made the transition feel much more extreme.
I support this theory. At the end of the day, it went from (roughly) getting dark around the time I was wrapping up at my desk (i.e., approaching 6 pm) to twilight hitting before 4 pm. It's nuts. Some of it is the orientation of my house - the sun is setting down the street, instead of directly across, shining into our windows - but a lot of it is simply that, 6 weeks before the solstice at 42° latitude, the days stop being bright an hour before actual sunset.
When DST ended in early/mid-October, you were still close to the equinox and an average amount of daylight vs. twilight.
A lot of people are sort of judgy about this. Everybody and their meddlesome aunt has the idea that when one travels to Europe and arrives in the morning one must immediately engage in vigorous activity until a sufficiently late European bedtime has been achieved. Otherwise, one will simply not adjust and furthermore one is likely not a person of much value at all! Now that I am in my third decade I think that I have finally amassed the self-confidence to counter this insistence and assert that in fact, what I need to do is immediately go to bed and nap on and off for 24 hours, after which I seem to be totally fresh-faced and adjusted, thankyouverymuch. I don't think that I have ever been bitchier than in the first 12 hours of trips when I was being held under strict orders to stay awake and participate in hearty cross-cultural discourse while, say, on a hike. As a result, I am probably personally responsible for the low regard Europeans have for Americans.
Once, I took an overnight train (2nd class, regular seats, no bunks) to Paris and then flew to LA that afternoon. Then about five days later flew direct from LA back to Paris, arriving to find that the Metro had gone on strike, though a couple of RER routes were running. I took an overnight train out. It was actually kind of great, as I was pretty much on my own time at that point and jetlag and time zones didn't mean a whole lot.
I don't like the switch at the end of DST because our son keeps waking up at the same time. It's been over a month and he still hasn't adjusted by more than half and hour. It isn't a big deal, so long as I get a nap every now and then.
The advice that I've heard for jet lag is to try to get some sunshine/natural light which will help your body figure out the new time.
Personally any long trip (by car or airplane) leaves me feeling really physically drained and unhappy for a day or two. It's a bit of a vicious cycle, I find travel unpleasant, so I do less of it, and have less practice adjusting. Thankfully I like where I live.
I don't remember the first day of my trip to Taiwan, so I suspect it means that I blacked out at some point rather than jet lag not being an issue. We were visiting family, though, so we might have spent the whole day with them before returning to the hotel.
Did you have jet lag in China, M/tch?
Personally any long trip (by car or airplane) leaves me feeling really physically drained and unhappy for a day or two.
Me too. Thus, I have been physically drained and unhappy basically continuously for the last three months.
I have a theory that lengthening daylight savings time so much has made the transition feel much more extreme
I'll second JRoth's seconding of this. It was the darkness in the morning that was getting to me, though. I was coming off of a cold and also in a not-so-great mental state re. my job search, and so it took me a bit of time to realize that it was more likely the late sunrise that was making me unable to get out of bed early, rather than being sick and depressed and lazy.
43: Nope, but that's not surprising since my method of travel there was getting drunk and then waking up on a boat.
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I love how in the comments Heebie backs off every one of her complaints. My mom's actually like this too. I'm just mad at the article. They're talking about a four-year-old. It's as if Andy Rooney had webisodes where he was all, "Ah, I just had a nice fart and I feel better. Get back on my lawn!"
45: There were morning issues too, but I didn't want to ramble.
At the current rate of whining, it's going to take four-year-old Alex a week to accept that it's time to put on his pajamas. I don't think my mom has that problem, though. Four-year-olds are practically always out of sorts about something and I know I personally am not great about pinning down what the source might be.
doing the 12-hour switch with babies/kids under 4 is genuinely a bitch. you just can't tell them "it's bedtime" when it's obvious to their bodies it's not, at all. I have spent a lot of time in a lot of hotel rooms in new york watching caillou at 3am and eating room service (it's got to be 24 hours!). or walking around outside with the stroller admiring silent storefronts on madison ave at 4am. essear, are you coming to see me? flying through our airport of awesomeness even? we went and met john quig/gan that way for a beer at the airport while he waited between flights; it was fun.
Babies and those who care for them are frequently not very rational.
Dumb babies...when will they learn to just grow up already!
Jetlag never bothered me until I was about 25. Then it started taking longer and longer for me to adjust. Until a few years ago when my very stubborn insomnia hit. Now jetlag doesn't affect me at all: I can not-sleep any time of the day!
essear, are you coming to see me? flying through our airport of awesomeness even?
I wish, but sadly, no. Well, I haven't booked the ticket yet, but it's unlikely I'll pass through Narnia. I'm going to Seoul.
Yeah, my only trick is to wake up sooner or stay awake longer than I really want to on the first day, until I'm on the same clock as more or less everyone else. It's a rough first day, but then it's fine. Coffee helps.