Shifting to a new time zone is never easy. Whichever way you travel, long distance journeys are almost always served with a side of crippling jet lag.
However, scientists from Northwestern University and the Santa Fe Institute have now discovered a new method to minimize the effects of jet lag and speed up its recovery.
Jet lag happens when our internal body clocks become out of sync with our surrounding environment. Our body runs on a series of different internal clocks that are calibrated by different external and internal factors.
Traveling to a new time zone can cause havoc on your sleep cycle, but scientists have found a new method to minimize this circadian disruption.Traveling to a new time zone can cause havoc on your sleep cycle, but scientists have found a new method to minimize this circadian disruption.Tatsiana Volkava/GettyThe ultimate pacemaker of the body sits in a cluster of nerve cells in a brain region called the hypothalamus. This pacemaker, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN, is highly influenced by light. However, some of the peripheral pacemakers in our organs are more responsive to food. Therefore, eating when it is dark or exposing yourself to artificial light at night can confuse these internal clocks and shift them out of whack with each other as well as your surroundings.
When we travel to a different timezone, this disruption becomes even worse and it can take a few days for your biological clocks to re-synchronize.
Jet lag is not only an annoyance for the duration of your vacation—it can have long-term health consequences too. Previous studies have linked jet lag to digestive issues, cardiovascular disease, and even accelerated aging. Indeed, disruption of our internal body clocks becomes more prevalent with age. So clearly it's something we want to avoid.
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At this point in time, we still know fairly little about how the body's internal clocks affect each other, which makes studying them complicated.
"Most studies primarily focus on one particular time cue or a single clock," Yitong Huang, first author of the recent study, said in a statement. "Important gaps remain in our understanding of the synchronization of multiple clocks under conflicting time cues."
To learn more about these interactions, Huang and her colleagues built a mathematical model that mimics some of the complexity of our internal clock network.
In their model, there are two sets of oscillators—those that are controlled by food and those that are controlled by lights. As well as these external cues, the oscillators can influence each other.
Mathematical model to represent simplified circadian clock system with differing external influences.Mathematical model to represent simplified circadian clock system with differing external influences.Huang et al.Using this model, the team found that certain factors, like lower sensitivity to light and weaker signals between the individual oscillators, made disruptions between these systems more extreme. Interestingly, these factors are all common symptoms of aging.
They also found a way to better synchronize the sets of oscillators after they had been disrupted: "Having a larger meal in the early morning of the new time zone can help overcome jet lag," Huang said. "Constantly shifting meal schedules or having a meal at night is discouraged, as it can lead to misalignment between internal clocks."
Their results were published in the journal Chaos on September 5.
Next, the authors hope to investigate what factors increase the resilience of our internal clocks to develop recommendations for preventing jet lag in the first place and keeping our circadian systems healthy in old age.
