The longest flights in the world are just getting longer. Emirates’ latest route from Dubai to Auckland clocks in at a startling 16.5 hours—it’s the lengthiest flight on the market—and Qantas plans to launch a new 17-hour route between Perth and London in 2018. But painful as long-haul flights can be, it’s their aftermath—jet lag—that you should really be dreading.
That might soon change, though. The medical community has taken the next step toward finding a jet-lag cure, thanks to a Salk Institute study published last year in Cell. According to Dr. Ronald Evans, the lead author of the study, a protein called Rev-ErbA (pronounced ree-verb-AY) may be the key to unlocking a regular, healthy circadian rhythm no matter where (or when) in the world you are.
Understanding Your Biological Clock
Turns out, the circadian rhythm, a physiological cycle that roughly matches up with the length of a day, doesn’t just regulate when we feel sleepy—it also regulates when we get hungry and when we feel most active.
“Under normal circumstances,” Evans said, “we sleep when it’s dark and wake up and eat when the sun rises.”
Eating is a key point: Circadian rhythm is about both sleep and metabolism. In other words, you can fight jet lag by consuming (and burning) calories at the right times as well as trying to sleep at proper times.
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Your circadian rhythm doesn’t regulate itself: Rev-ErbA does. According to Evans’s study, the protein acts as a sort of master switch that coordinates the “turning on and off” of genes that regulate our circadian rhythms, including those involved in metabolism.
Pinpointing that master switch and understanding how it works is the first step to controlling it artificially. By regulating both the amount of Rev-ErbA in the body as well as how much it fluctuates over the course of a day, we might eventually find a cure for jet lag. And it doesn’t end there: The same science may eventually offer relief to people with chronic sleeping issues and other chronic conditions that can develop as a result of a disrupted circadian cycle.
Taking Control of Your Body’s Master Switch
A pill that prevents jet lag is still years down the road, but plenty of simple but specific strategies let you take matters into your own hands. Yes, different strokes work for different folks—frequent road warriors tout everything from popping a pill before takeoff, to doing yoga on arrival, to apps—but the more we understand the mechanisms that create jet lag, the better equipped we are to pick and choose our tactics.
Evans’s biggest takeaway is to place equal importance on all three of those pillars of circadian rhythm when resetting your schedule in a new time zone. The sooner you’re moving around, sleeping, and eating at the right times, the sooner you’ll adjust.
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