Men's Journal

CNN anchor John King uses frequent power naps to overcome jet lag. Photo credit: illustration by John Cuneo

Some of the world’s most experienced travelers share their jet lag stories.

By Darren Reidy

Samantha Brown, host of The Travel Channel’s Great Weekends
Last year, Brown flew 230 days — nearly three weeks out of every month — to film her show. “It’s a huge battle,” she says, “especially flying to Europe so much.” “You arrive that night and have to start the next day at seven in the morning. You feel like a different person.” Despite her usual melatonin on the plane and double shot of espresso after landing, nothing was working in Copenhagen. “I was in Nyhavn, the former red-light district,” she says. “It’s now a quaint promenade by the sea, with crayon-colored homes. My body felt like cement and so did my brain. I’m standing in front of the buildings and sailboats, improvising my own script. I kept saying Hoboken instead of Copenhagen. I had no idea why I kept saying it. I could have sworn I was saying Copenhagen. People are listening, drinking beer outside at tables. It was mortifying, knowing they were all thinking, who is this dumb American?”

Pico Iyer, Travel Writer
When we reached legendary travel writer Pico Iyer, he was, as usual, about to catch another plane and, inevitably, seriously jet-lagged. The 52-year-old, who divides some of the year between Japan and Santa Barbara, claims he doesn’t travel much. But he accurately describes his method of movement as “concentrated bursts.” (A typical month: California, Japan, Beijing, India, Dubai, Mauritius, Dubai again, India again, Sri Lanka, and back through Beijing to Japan.) To ease the effects of jet lag, he recommends walking on fresh grass (there’s no scientific basis for this, but some claim it helps you acclimate). Iyer isn’t exactly winning the battle. Jet lag has gotten him in hot water with the IRS, had him in tears after watching the “highly unmoving” Affleck-Paltrow movie Bounce, and made him write “passionate and intimate letters” to people he’s barely met. This, along with a regular habit of not knowing what city he’s in or even what month it is. But derangement has its uses. “Jet lag allows me to see the dark side of cities,” Iyer says, “their sleeping life, their subconscious—-the parts of them that I’d never see in my normal life.”

Shaun O’Hara, NFL Pro-Bowl Center
With rumors of a London Super Bowl (and even a London franchise), it may be time for NFL teams to come up with some anti-jet lag strategies. O’Hara knows exactly what jet lag can do to your performance on the field. In 2007, his team, the New York Giants, played the Miami Dolphins in London. “We left here Thursday around five,” he says. “We landed at six Friday morning. We were all like zombies. We rolled right into meetings and went out to practice. It felt like an all-nighter in college.” On Saturday, the team was desperately trying to catch up on sleep. Jet lag’s chief symptoms are slowed mental and physical reflexes (note to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell: both make players more vulnerable to injuries), and on Sunday, it showed. The Giants scored a touchdown and a pair of field goals in the first half in an ugly, attritional, flub-and-penalty scrum that had them riding out the clock for a 13-10 win. O’Hara, who had to take a nap before the game, blamed their narrow escape on the muddy and windy conditions (always a problem for Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning, whose passes often looked like flying saucers). “The season is long and tough and hard on your body,” says O’Hara. “But once the game is started you’re not thinking about sleep.” Still, he’s not keen on the travel. “Guys don’t even like flying to California,” he says. “I hope I never have to do any of it again.”

Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia
To help get to sleep, Chouinard takes Benadryl (which, additionally, can have some antidepressant effects). He also offers some practical advice: “Travel north and south. I do more and more of that instead of east and west. I go to Alaska, British Columbia, and Patagonia.”

Bill Altaffer, Founder of Expedition Photo Travel
In 2005, Altaffer was dubbed the world’s most traveled man. Altaffer never kept an exact record, but he’s been to every country on Earth, and many more than once, as well as some 600 islands and disputed territories. “When you get to your destination, you’re not thinking clearly,” he says, “so you’re vulnerable to theft, pickpockets, or leaving something somewhere.” Nearly a decade ago, returning from a trip to the South Pacific’s Pitcairn Islands (where the HMS Bounty’s mutineers settled), Altaffer did just that. He had bought an irreplaceable dolphin-shaped cane, handcarved by the natives. “At the airport, I had to make a phone call,” he says. “This is in the days before cell phones. I rested it a minute, then I forgot it. I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t jet-lagged.” When Altaffer returns from especially long trips, like the annual trek he takes to the wilds of Siberia, he has “a couple margaritas and a caesar salad; take some melatonin and aspirin and go to sleep for 30 hours straight.”

Pete Wentz, Lyricist, Fall Out Boy
“If I go on an airplane I’m going to sleep through the entire thing,” says Wentz. With Fall Out Boy touring in Asia, Europe and Australia, Wentz has been known to use any means necessary to conk out on long flights — melatonin, Bloody Marys, or “whatever pharmaceuticals I can take.” Although he usually follows his doctor’s orders, popping an Ambien every now and then, he’s still a little wary of the sleeping pills’ side effects. The 30-year-old bassist has woken up thinking that his plane was crashing, and on another occasion watched as an unnamed friend urinated in his seat while sleeping. “That’s like the weirdest drug to take — it puts you to sleep and the next thing you know you wake up in your backyard.”

Wayne Coyne, Lead Singer, Flaming Lips
After twenty-three years of touring with the Flaming Lips, Coyne has developed a simple philosophy to travel and jet lag: sleep when you’re tired, don’t when you’re not. He’s seen too many people try to stay awake to adjust to time periods, “going through life as zombies,” to mess with their body’s internal rhythm. He’s lucky though, and with all those years of practice has evolved a way to keep going. “I can be dead tired and not have slept for 20-hours and I can crawl under a table or chair and sleep for 20-seconds. As long as it’s actual sleep I can wake up and go for another two days.” For those that can’t power nap as effectively, Coyne suggests another simple remedy. “On a plane, you’re getting super dried out, you need to drink a bunch of water. It’s too simple – it’s like a doctor gave you the secret potion to life. It’s unbelievable. The simplest things work. You can drink water, go to sleep and smile a lot.”

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