Study Points to a Way to Prevent Jet Lag While You Sleep

As per them, exposure to short flashes of light in night could help travelers to get accustomed to new time zones and avoid jet lag.

Or they do nothing and suffer the exhausting consequences; the body eventually adjusts at a slow pace of about one hour a day, taking up to three days to catch up.

Humans typically adjust their biological clocks at the rate of one hour per day when traveling far.

The researchers posited that light therapy would be most effective at night, during a person’s sleep, because circadian rhythms are more sensitive to light during this time.

Subsequent measurements of melatonin in the saliva showed that the flashes adjusted the participants’ body clocks two hours forward, on average. A person’s brain can be tricked into adjusting more quickly to disturbances in sleep cycles by increasing how long he or she is exposed to light prior to traveling to a new time zone. “If you are flying to NY [from California] tomorrow, tonight you use the light therapy”, said Zeitzer, citing an example.

WSJ News reported that, the Stanford researchers are working with a Silicon Valley biotech startup to develop a commercial product they hope will be available later this year-a sleep mask that delivers the light flashes to people while they are sleeping. Some of the participants were then exposed to continuous light for an hour while sleeping in the lab. Another group was exposed to a sequence of flashes of various frequencies for an hour.

The dreaded jet lag often occurs when our sleep patterns are out of sync with our circadian system, which is basically our body’s internal clock. The treatment “exploits biology in the eye” to speed up the brain’s adjustment to time changes, he said. What this essentially means is that flashing lights are a much better solution than a constant light and more importantly, the flashing lights need not wake you up, making the jet lag cure a lot easier to administer. However, when the light was shone continuously for an hour, sleepiness was only delayed by 36 minutes.

Dr Zeitzer explained how the flashing-light therapy during the night could be used to adapt to travelling through a five hour time shift, such as from Britain to the Maldives, or from California to the East Coast. But flashing light therapy, when timed at the right moment, could help you make the transition to different time zones.

Flashing light is said to work better than continuous light partly because the gaps of darkness between flashes allow pigments in the eye that respond to light to be re-activated.

“The first is that the cells in the retina that transmit the light information to the circadian system continue to fire for several minutes after the stimulus – in this case, flashing light – is no longer there”, he said.

But a team of scientists from Stanford University led by Jamie Zeitzer, a neurobiologist, might have figured out a clever way to trick our brain into thinking that we are in the same time zone.

The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation’s top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service.