I am surrounded by colleagues who are taking part in an experiment to determine if jet lag can be tamed. They have formed an ad hoc test group to try out various drug cocktails and regimes. Some of them are flying through as many time zones as one trip can accommodate. Body clocks, real clocks, circadian rhythms, night and day, every conceivable challenge is being endured in the interests of research.
For as long as this magazine has existed, jet lag has been a constant topic, ranging from claims to have a cure to the kind of empirical reporting now under way in the hope of finding, if not a cure, at least some relief.
And long before the magazine existed, I have steadfastly resisted all the nostrums. Even though one of my oldest friends was involved in developing the use of melatonin as a jet lag treatment—and as a globe-girdling doctor in high demand he was his own guinea pig—I swallowed neither the argument nor the pill. Never.
At one point in my career I had to commute weekly between London and New York, often to be found wherever there were three empty seats in the back covered in a blanket and snoozing happily.
My inspiration for handling this experience was a colleague who flew even more frequently than I did. His advice was not medical, but simple: “I tell my body what time it is, and it believes me.”
For as long as this magazine has existed, jet lag has been a constant topic, ranging from claims to have a cure to the kind of empirical reporting now under way in the hope of finding, if not a cure, at least some relief.
And long before the magazine existed, I have steadfastly resisted all the nostrums. Even though one of my oldest friends was involved in developing the use of melatonin as a jet lag treatment—and as a globe-girdling doctor in high demand he was his own guinea pig—I swallowed neither the argument nor the pill. Never.
At one point in my career I had to commute weekly between London and New York, often to be found wherever there were three empty seats in the back covered in a blanket and snoozing happily.
My inspiration for handling this experience was a colleague who flew even more frequently than I did. His advice was not medical, but simple: “I tell my body what time it is, and it believes me.”
This from a man to whom, it must be said, the rear of a plane was as
unknown as the Gobi desert, and whose idea of in-flight meals revolved
entirely around a large can of Beluga caviar and the best vintages of
Montrachet. He has never turned right in his life as he goes into the
cabin. Nonetheless, he could go straight from the flight to a meeting
and be in total command, whatever the time, longitude or language.
I cannot match that kind of self-induced body and mind control, but I have always found that when traveling with others who have dosed, napped and generally followed medical recommendations. I have noticed that it is they who seem to replicate the survivors of a train wreck on arrival whereas I can breeze through the airport all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
After one flight from London to Sydney, I was whipped directly from the plane to a sports stadium, where I had to interview, on camera, some terrifyingly muscular heroes of the violent sport known as Australian football. I did it without blinking, while others who had flown with me and dosed on melatonin seemed still to be circling above in a holding pattern.
Only once has my composure been intimidated by a fellow traveler. Early one morning, arriving at Malpensa, the woeful international airport serving Milan, I had just reached the tarmac from the rear stairs of the plane when I was hailed by someone descending from the front.
It turned out to be the then publisher of Vogue, the illustrious bible of high fashion and a fellow Condé Nast publication. He was headed for Milan's fashion week, and I was headed for the hills of Piedmont and the bounty of its vineyards and pig farms.
At this hour, a little after sunrise, surrounded by a typical Piedmontese fog that, even in spring, can chill you to the quick, the publisher was so polished, so impeccably suited, so spotless in grooming, so uncreased in every sense, and so gung-ho, he sucked the smugness right out of me. I felt like a refugee from a frat party.
“How do you do it?” I asked him, lamely.
“Do what?”
“Look like that at this time of the morning?”
He seemed finally to have taken in my back-of-the-plane patina.
“I tell my body what time it is and it believes me” he said.
I cannot match that kind of self-induced body and mind control, but I have always found that when traveling with others who have dosed, napped and generally followed medical recommendations. I have noticed that it is they who seem to replicate the survivors of a train wreck on arrival whereas I can breeze through the airport all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
After one flight from London to Sydney, I was whipped directly from the plane to a sports stadium, where I had to interview, on camera, some terrifyingly muscular heroes of the violent sport known as Australian football. I did it without blinking, while others who had flown with me and dosed on melatonin seemed still to be circling above in a holding pattern.
Only once has my composure been intimidated by a fellow traveler. Early one morning, arriving at Malpensa, the woeful international airport serving Milan, I had just reached the tarmac from the rear stairs of the plane when I was hailed by someone descending from the front.
It turned out to be the then publisher of Vogue, the illustrious bible of high fashion and a fellow Condé Nast publication. He was headed for Milan's fashion week, and I was headed for the hills of Piedmont and the bounty of its vineyards and pig farms.
At this hour, a little after sunrise, surrounded by a typical Piedmontese fog that, even in spring, can chill you to the quick, the publisher was so polished, so impeccably suited, so spotless in grooming, so uncreased in every sense, and so gung-ho, he sucked the smugness right out of me. I felt like a refugee from a frat party.
“How do you do it?” I asked him, lamely.
“Do what?”
“Look like that at this time of the morning?”
He seemed finally to have taken in my back-of-the-plane patina.
“I tell my body what time it is and it believes me” he said.
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