The Best Ways to Fight Jet Lag, According to Flight Attendants

If you want to know the best ways to avoid jetlag, it’s best to go straight to the experts: flight attendants. Here, two flight attendants share their tips and tricks for fighting the sleepiness and staying awake, not just on long flights but also at the destination when they arrive and have some time.

Any frequent traveler knows the downfall of time zone changes: jetlag. That sleepy, irritable, sometimes nauseous and weirdly sleepless period where you have yet to adjust to your new schedule. Flight attendants, some of the heaviest travelers of all of us, often have the most valuable tips for staying awake. Insider spoke to two of them, Melanie Glessing with American Airlines and Taylor Reynolds with Prime Jet, to get the details on how they stay up through long flights and beyond.

“I overcome jet lag by trying to sleep as much as I can whenever I can,” Glessing told Insider. “On international flights, the crews will typically go right to sleep as soon as we get to the hotel for about two hours and then force themselves to wake up and assimilate into society. It’s usually a bad idea to try and ride the lightning and go straight out to sightsee because you’ve just worked all night. You will crash and burn. Hard.”

Reynolds tries to schedule her sleep according to the actual day.

“If I’m going abroad, I don’t go to sleep right away and I wait until it is night time so that I sleep a full night and can wake up early in the morning,” she told Insider. “I typically don’t get jet-lagged unless I am somewhere for more than four days.”

Other things that help? Coffee, walking around, talking to others, and short naps whenever possible.

[Image: Flickr]