Seoul part 1: On beating jet-lag
It’s 8pm. I’m sleep-deprived and gliding along a moving walkway in Heathrow Airport. I’ve been awake for 15 hours and my journey has not even started yet. I’m tired but also excited, and there’s a method to the madness.
As I slide from one walkway to the next, I take some time to look around. The corridor is empty as far forward and back as I can see. Not many travellers on a Monday night, it would seem.
Airports are nowhere places and they tend to be all more or less alike, but Heathrow has always had a very distinct identity to me: lots of lights, shiny surfaces and shades of blue. I’ve only flown from here a handful of times, but it feels instantly familiar.
A contrast to what I’m about to do, which is boarding an 11 hour flight to a land that’s as foreign as they get: Seoul, South Korea.
I’m going to publish a diary of this trip, but it won’t be your run-of-the-mill travel log. Rather, I’ll touch on different topics I found interesting. I hope you’ll like it.
On the day of my flight to Seoul, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, to a stillness I had never experienced before.
London does go to sleep, after all. Maybe just not as early as 8pm, as I did the night before.
These unusual bedtime and wakeup times were all part of a plan to beat jet-lag, mostly based on JetLag Rooster.
The idea is quite simple: give your body some days to adjust to the timezone difference so it will come as less of a shock once you land. In my case, it worked pretty well and I’ll definitely do something similar next time I have to deal with jet-lag.
There is a 7 hour difference between London and Seoul: 10:00 in London corresponds to 17:00 in Seoul. It is counter-intuitive, but to move from the UK to Korea I had to go to bed (and wake up) increasingly early. This is how my sleep timetable looked:
Day 1: 23:30 ~ 7:30 (or 6:30 ~ 14:30 Seoul time)
Day 2: 22:30 ~ 6:30 (or 5:30 ~ 13:30 Seoul time)
Day 3: 21:30 ~ 5:30 (or 4:30 ~ 12:30 Seoul time)
Day 4: 20:30 ~ 4:30 (or 3:30 ~ 11:30 Seoul time)
Day 5: 19:30 ~ 3:30 (or 2:30 ~ 10:30 Seoul time)
By the end of it, my sleeping pattern was more or less that of a nightlifer in Seoul, which proved to be a good compromise.
I should point out that day 5 was purely theoretical, as I had to catch my 11 hour flight at 21:00. The plan for that night was simply to get as much sleep I could on the plane, which is also why I was pretty tired when I arrived at the airport.
JetLag Rooster can produce a plan that relies on melatonin to facilitate sleep. I had never really looked into melatonin before, so this was a good chance to nerd out a bit and collect information.
Melatonin is a hormone that’s normally produced by the body when it gets dark and has the effect of preparing the body for sleep. Melatonin supplements are essentially ways of tricking your body into feeling like it’s sleepy time.
Recommendations I found on when to take melatonin vary wildly: from 5 hours before sleeping, to 3 hours, to less than 1 hour.
There’s also a lot of lore about side effects: some people experience very vivid dreams, some people have horrible nightmares, others sleep fitfully and end up not rested at all.
While it would have been interesting to see how melatonin was working for me, a rather unexpected fact stopped my plan in its tracks: melatonin is not sold over the counter in the UK. Weird, considering how liberally it’s sold in the US and in Italy, but the NHS states that
“at the moment there’s not enough evidence to say whether melatonin supplements are effective”.
All in all, I ended up not needing it: I slept pretty well even when moving my bedtime around. If you’re planning on using melatonin yourself, know that your mileage may vary considerably and that you’ll need a GP prescription to buy it in the UK.
Up next: On being colonised.
