the.com/jetlag
your body still in the old timezone, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge you've moved
means the groggy, disoriented exhaustion you feel after flying quickly across several time zones, while your internal clock lags behind the local one
from A 20th-century compound born of the jet age: 'jet' from the jet aircraft that finally made it possible to outrun the sun, plus 'lag' (an old word for falling behind, probably of Scandinavian origin). The word couldn't exist until planes were fast enough to drop you in a new timezone before your body had finished the trip — so it dates from the late 1960s, when commercial jet travel made the affliction common enough to need a name.
- flight direction
- eastward trips hit harder than westward ones
- internal clock
- the body runs slightly longer than 24 hours
- recovery rate
- roughly one day per timezone crossed
- the culprit
- light, not altitude, resets your inner clock
- jet age only
- slow ships never gave you this problem