Two key ingredients to jet lag recovery that everyone misses

From an Integrative MD who loves to travel

It should be no surprise that I am writing this in the early morning given that I am in the middle of jet-lag from traversing the world from India to Seattle.

Sighting Mount Rainer as I arrived back home after 65 hours was a sight for sore eyes (and body!)

Yes, I am back home but still in that fuzzy in-between stage of neither here nor there.

And you can trust that as an Integrative Doc, I practice all the tried and true parts of recovering from jet-lag:
✈️ HYDRATION!
✈️ Getting morning and dusk light in my eyes to reset my melanopsin receptors and circadian rhythms (this is SO important if you don’t practice this after crossing time zones!)
✈️ Eating light, non-processed foods (this is important btw, I do not eat any big meals in these first few days.)
✈️ Getting movement, but gentle. So I am doing long walks but not back to the gym yet.
✈️ Tiny doses of caffeine and naps (often together) if needed to help reset my sleeping time
✈️ Melatonin if needed
✈️ Avoiding anything I do not have to do, i.e. taking it easy as able

Trust me, these are VERY important.

But there are two things that you won’t see in any holistic or medical article about jet-lag that I have found to be just as critical.

No, I do not have a formal study to prove it. But I have 26 years of practice with patients and 50 years of personal travel to over 50 countries, often with small children or my disabled son and often over many time zones. And I can say that these work.

Now, before I explain those, let me tell you that this trip back was no regular one. Due to historic flooding in Dubai, I was in airplanes or airports for 65 hours straight (!!) and that time was extremely stressful because the majority of it was in limbo and constant vigilance. Let’s just say it did a number on my nervous system!

Yet, these two ingredients hold, and maybe even more so.

✈️ INTEGRATION

This one comes from a principle I use in psychedelic medicine as well. After a psychedelic journey, the key factor in who will benefit the most is largely due to how they integrate the experience with me.

Integration is taking what transpired and essentially, ‘making sense’ of it to extract the lessons and wisdom they can and apply those to their live in a durable way.

After we take a big trip, we are often in a rush to get over jet-lag and get back to life. (And believe me, with this hellacious delay, I am back home later than expected and in a more disheveled state so the natural tendency is to worry about how I will get back to parenting and working as soon as possible. That is a reality I cannot escape.)

But what if you use the time of hazy jet-lag to integrate? It is a time span in which you are largely useless in any productive sense anyway. So I spend some time staring into space and reflecting on my trip and what I learned or gained.

And this trip had much of that to reflect on. It was a challenging trip in many ways, I won’t lie. And that was before the way it ended (which is a story for another time, this delay was a Lord-of-the Flies kind of experience!)

I was looking forward to being home and the tendency is to then want to ‘get back’ to being at home too soon.

But then I would miss the life changing ways this trip showed me some very important lessons I need to hold dear. Some being the importance of re-connecting with family (especially some with whom there were drifts), the key need to create boundaries as an adult with family who still treat you like a child, and reminders of the things I want to hold most dear in this second half of my life. Many more but the point is that I do not want to rush into life and miss it at the same time.

Integration is about pausing, reflecting and noticing. Travel is a way to transport yourself to another place physically but the ways you transport your mind and spirit may be more important. Do not forget to integrate.

For me, integration happens in pausing and staying off screens and in walking. For you, it may look different.

✈️ GRACE

I cannot over-emphasize this enough. Jet-lag is a tender time, especially as you get older. Your body moves slower and less efficiently. Your mind functions in a haze. You feel often like you are moving through thick fog with weights on your body.

So, yes, I am dying to get back to my exercise routine, to getting adequate protein, to catching up on the million work to-dos, to writing. All of it.

And yet, I just simply cannot do that. I can only do what I can do.

I have awoken very early both days since returning and I hear an initial thought in my mind of wondering, “Maybe I should go to the gym, I am up anyway.”

But I resist. My body is not ready to do what I usually do.

I know my email inbox is FULL of action items of things I want to respond to.

But I resist. My mind is not ready to take on all of it.

My teenager wants to go back to her regular social schedule automatically and wants me to let her friend sleep over. “I missed her!”

But I resist. I need space to recover.

And on and on.

All along the way, I need to give myself and my body grace. Grace to transition. Grace to integrate and acclimate.

I cannot rush it.

I usually write to you on Fridays but there was no way that was happening. And frankly, I would have skipped it all together but this morning, it felt right. If it hadn’t I would have seen you next week and all in the world would have still been okay.

Grace is the essential ingredient to recovery, (and spoiler alert, to everything! If you read my book, Joy Is My Justice, you know that I think grace is nothing short of revolutionary!)

So, I hope this helps next time you are too in a foggy haze of jet-lag. Let me know if you have other key tools that help you so that we can share as a community.

Until next week, may you go slow and steady. I, myself, will be returning to the couch…