Sleep and Sunlight: The Cure to Jet Lag

With recent studies an all natural method to ‘cure’ jet lag could be sleep, sun, and a supplement of melatonin. A few hours after the sun goes down, the sky turns dark, and you’re about to go to sleep, your brain releases melatonin according to the light outside.

“The clock in your brain doesn’t just take cues from light, but from the hormone melatonin as well. Every night, about two to three hours before you conk out, your brain starts to secrete melatonin in response to darkness” said Richard A. Friedman, a New York Times journalist.

When you travel across multiple time zones, your brain is still stuck in the time zone that you left, and not the current one, hence you get jet lag. Jet lag causes fatigue, malaise, poor concentration, mood changes, as well as sleep deprivation.

People have found that when you travel east and west you get different reactions to the time zone change, west manic episodes, and east bouts of depression. This is found along with the symptoms of jet lag that could all be avoided with the right amount of sleep and sunlight at the right time.

“So now you know the fix for jet lag: Travel east and you’ll need morning light and evening melatonin; go west and you’ll need evening light and morning melatonin” said Friedman.

People who have been diagnosed with more serious issues other than jet lag such as bipolar disorder, and major depression may have another way to keep the overwhelming episodes at bay, without drugs, researchers say.

This new type of therapy is called wake therapy and has thus been proven successful so far for treating theses issues. “The idea is to get up for the day halfway through the usual sleep period, which shifts the circadian clock to an earlier time. It’s thought that this works by realigning the sleep cycle with other circadian rhythms, like changes in levels of body temperature and the stress hormone cortisol, that are also out of sync with each other in depression”(Friedman).

With the continuation of this research and the success it has been attributed to, what other results will come of this?