Jet lag is caused by an upset of the body’s circadian rhythms, the internal clock that tells you when to sleep, eat and be active. When you travel by air, everyone at your destination is on one schedule while you, thanks to the speed of jet travel, are still “lagging” behind on another. The more time zones you skip, the worse the effects of jet lag.
“Traveler’s hangover,” characterized by headache, dizziness, fatigue and digestive upset, has long been considered a necessary evil of long-distance flights. It doesn’t have to be because there are many ways to minimize this physical distress.
Start by resetting your clock mentally and physically as soon as you board the plane:
* Change your watch to the time it is at your destination.
* When it’s night at your destination, go to sleep. If you need help dozing off, ask your doctor about using over-the-counter melatonin tablets to supplement your body’s own production of the natural sleep inducer.
* When it’s mealtime at your destination, eat, but do so sparingly. Airline meals that are high in fat, salt and cholesterol will make you feel bloated. Take along carbohydrate snacks from home in case the mealtime is not in sync with the aircraft service.
Next, exercise to promote circulation and stay limber, and choose the right liquids:
* Drink water. Aircraft cabin humidity is very low. To avoid dehydration, drink 8 ounces of water for every hour you’re in the air.
* Avoid alcohol, which adds to dehydration.
* Avoid caffeine, which is a diuretic and can interfere with sleep.
When you arrive at your destination, go outside during daylight hours to acclimate your body to the new light-dark schedule. If you arrive at night, go straight to bed and try to get seven or eight hours of sleep. If you arrive in the daytime, stay awake until a reasonable local bedtime. Regulate your eating to the local times. If you arrive in the morning, have a high-protein breakfast for energy.
If you absolutely must hit the ground running at your destination, consider the approach used by Olympic athletes when they travel - the anti-jet-lag diet created in 1982 by the Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s research centers. This diet is based on the theory that different foods cause different bodily reactions, including sleepiness. The feast-and-fast regimen starts three days before departure:
* On Day 1, feast on a high-protein breakfast and lunch (meat, eggs, fish, dairy products and legumes) and a dinner loaded with carbohydrates (pasta, bread, rice and potatoes). Limit any consumption of caffeine to between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
* On Day 2, fast with light meals of fruit, soup or salad. Limit caffeine to between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
* On Day 3, feast again (same diet as on Day 1).
* On Day 4, the day of departure, fast again until it’s breakfast time at your destination. End the fast with a high-protein breakfast.
The Argonne diet requires some effort and discipline - cheating greatly affects its efficacy - but it is the most scientific and comprehensive approach to making sure you’re in top form when your feet hit terra firma again, wherever that may be.
by David Di Cristo
Saturday, January 17, 2009
How to Prevent Jet Lag
Nine Vacation Tips For You And Your Digital Camera
Vacations are one of the things that most people look forward to most in life. Whether traveling as a couple or with a whole family, some of the best memories are made during a well planned out vacation trip. It doesn’t matter if you are traveling half way around the world, up to the mountains to a family cabin, or a quick trip to the beach, the escape from everyday life that a good vacation provides can be priceless. Your digital camera plays a big part in preserving those vacation memories that you will want to look back on in the future. Whether sharing them online with friends or printing them out and using them in scrapbooking, vacation photos can be one of the most important type of photos you take.
Here are nine digital camera tips that will enhance your next vacation:
1. Keep your digital camera in a camera bag or some other type of enclosure if you plan on taking it to the beach. Sand can get into a digital camera very easily and make it inoperable. Also, after using your camera at the beach make sure there are no grains of sand on the outside of the zoom lens before you retract it into the camera body.
2. Before leaving on your vacation clear your digital camera’s memory card, write your name and address on a piece of paper, and take a picture of it. Now the first picture on your memory card will be the info someone needs to return the camera to you should you lose it. It also isn’t a bad idea to have your contact information in your camera bag and on the camera itself.
3. Make sure you buy the right amount of batteries that you will need for your digital camera before you leave on your vacation. Batteries are usually harder to find, especially if they are an odd type or specialty batteries, and more expensive in a resort or vacation area.
4. Though it does use more battery power, using the LCD screen that most digital cameras come with to take pictures is best because what you see on the screen is exactly what photo is taken. Often, with some cameras, what you see in the viewfinder is not the exact frame of the photo that is taken.
5. Make sure to bring your digital camera’s cable along on vacation with you. One great way to save space on your camera’s memory card is to take advantage of either your hotel’s internet connection or an internet cafe to upload photos to a remote source. You can even email them to yourself, if need be. This also is a great backup for your vacation photos if your camera happens to become lost or stolen.
6. Practice with your digital camera at home, especially if it is new to you, so that you understand the settings and how best to take pictures in various lighting and indoor/outdoor situations. The last thing you want to do on your vacation is spend valuable time trying to figure out how your camera works. The last thing you want to do after returning from your vacation is find out that your pictures didn’t turn out like they should have.
7. Rest assured that when returning from your vacation that sending your digital camera through the airport security and detection devices will not harm your images. If by chance you also have a standard camera or disposable camera, you may want to hand them to the security personnel and ask that they be inspected by hand.
8. Actually taking multiple memory cards instead of just one is a good way to distribute photos so that in the event that your digital camera is lost or stolen, some of the photos you have already taken may be preserved on a memory card that wasn’t inside the camera when it disappeared.
9. Keep your digital camera on your person whenever possible. There are many times, like eating out for example, where it may be tempting to just set your camera down on a table or counter. This opens you up to having your camera stolen and also opens up the possibility that you could walk away and accidentally leave your camera behind.
Often the only way to have anything long lasting from a great vacation is to take a good amount of photos while on your trip. These photos can be used by you to look back at the fun times you had and also can be used as a way of showing friends and family what you did on your vacation. But these photos will be worthless if they don’t develop well, are taken under poor conditions, or are not able to be taken because your digital camera was lost, stolen, or damaged.
by Mark Peters
Keep in Touch Even When on a Business Trip
If you play a crucial role in your organization, have the responsibility to leave information about how you can be reached when you are out of the office. Keep your mobile phone on and leave numbers and a list of places where you may be reached during those times. This may also be critical in cases where a lot of people rely on a lot of decisions or help from you – situations where they cannot decide for themselves nor have the authority to do so.
Technology, nowadays, has overcome this barrier. Gone are the days when the only contact before and after flight was the airport pay phone. You now have your mobile phone and Internet hotspots when you are at the airport, as well as aboard the aircraft (using the on-board aircraft phones). You may need to identify the technology you need to arm yourself with the equipment that will help you be better connected and provide you with tools to make you more productive in areas outside your office.
You may want to get equipment that is reliable. You will be lugging this whenever you go out on business trips. This will be your “office outside your office”; important business presentations and company files may be stored in your laptop. A good reliable mobile phone, too, will be aid you in what you will need to do business effectively during the whole trip.
Try to organize things for your team while you are on the go. Good-sized corporations usually have their own Intranet system, so even while you are away, you can still tap into the local company database for coordination and updates.
Manage your phone systems; you can set your office telephone to forward the call to your mobile phone so that you can still keep in touch as if you were sitting in the confines of your office.
There are also added features that technology systems have made available nowadays. There are systems that allow you to access your desktop computer at the office while you are in a remote station, like your laptop. There may be instances that you need to retrieve data from your office computer that you either forgot to upload or data that has become of interest while you are conducting your meetings outside the office. You can have your IT department personnel configure this for you, just in case you need to pull out the information while on the go.
by Gary Eugene
How to Deal With Business Travel on a Short Notice
Everybody hates going on business trips on short notice. It is always better to plan ahead when you are considering going on a trip. Experience dictates that when we practice this kind of preparation, fewer problems will be encountered when traveling. In the business world, however, it is not unusual that you need to go to a certain place right away since the immediacy of your arrival will ultimately determine the accomplishment of a business goal. You will be pleased to know that for short notice trips, there are actually a number of preparations that you can take on to make up for the lack of time to plan these trips ahead of time.
You would most definitely hate scurrying about booking flights and making hotel reservations. Certain jobs and industries inherently and regularly send their associates off on business trips at a moment’s notice; hence, if you are constantly expecting this type of practice, here are some ideas on making early arrangements for these specific types of occurrences to help save you from last-minute travel stress.
With trips on short notice, cost-cutting measures are usually bypassed. Airlines usually charge a higher rate on flights booked in full and at a certain specific date and time. Make certain that the company you work for has a travel policy, setting aside a budget for these types of travel scenarios.
The portion of the travel with the least leg room would have to be the flight accommodations. Travelocity or Orbitz, some of the most popular search tools on the Internet, can be utilized to help you start off in finding the airlines that have flight schedules in sync with the ones that you will be taking. As soon as you have chosen an airline, you may browse their website. You will sometimes find that they have promotions, giving more affordable fares even with those on short notice. It is strongly recommended that you spend your money on flights that are nonstop since flights with layovers might threaten your already very limited time schedule. Nonstop flights will better assure you of the priority of your business goal.
Regarding hotel reservations and accommodations, those concerns can also be planned and booked in advance. If you know for a fact that there will be certain places or locations that you will be visiting often, then look for a hotel nearest to those sites so you can save up on cab fares. When you have the addresses and contact numbers of these key establishments, business travel on short notice can be handled as easily as making a few phone calls.
by Gary Eugene
Backpackers Guide to Planning a Trip
Travelling is a fun activity that many are dreaming of doing, with the expenses it involves though; many find themselves having to postpone travel plans indefinitely until they are comfortable with the budget. For some, this may take years and even centuries. The sad fact is, travelling is very expensive – and it is even more costly if not planned well. For those who really would like to explore the world with a tight (but realistic) budget, the “backpacker” route may be the way to go. Backpacking is not for everyone though, before anything else, set expectations straight and clear – no 5-star luxury treatment. This does not mean less fun though; with a well-planned itinerary backpacking is a great way to experience new places and cultures. Planning a backpack trip is no easy task; it requires tedious research and a substantial amount of time.
The first step in planning is setting a budget and checking if this is enough for the trip. On an excel file, make a travel expense chart that shows the budget on the top most section. Then enumerate all the details that need to be deducted from the budget (e.g. plane fare, hotel, visa, etc.). When the items are identified, start a search online for the actual cost. Placing the detailed expenses on an excel sheet and setting up the functions to automatically total the items and then deduct it from the budget would first save a lot of time from manual computations and secondly prevent human errors.
Setting up basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and functions on an excel file is very easy to do – certainly easier than doing it with a calculator and paper. Each cost entered would be deducted from the set budget, making the planner check easily if the money is enough. If the expenses go beyond the budget, then check the list again and see if there are items than can be crossed out. Some frills may need to be sacrificed. In doing this list, the trip organizer should remember to leave provisions for food and miscellaneous expenses.
Once the backpackers are comfortable with the excel sheet of expenses, it is then time to check each item again and make the necessary bookings for things such as the airfare, train fares, hotels and transportation. It is often cheaper to book online and way ahead of time. When making a booking for the plane fare, the organizer should note that most (if not all) budget airlines enforce a “touch move” policy wherein booked tickets cannot be postponed or refunded. Thus, everyone should be sure that the schedules can be followed. File vacation leaves ahead; get the necessary parental permission and final the tour list at least 2 months in advance for a sufficient planning time.
The next step is organizing the list that the group needs to pack. Hop back on the cyber world to research on the country of destination. Check what type of clothes to wear and advisable extras to bring such as mosquito repellent, sun block lotion, lotion, etc. depending on the season. There are sites that provide insights from travelers who have been to the country of destination.
One must remember that in a backpack tour, the success of the trip heavily relies on proper preparation. Allow sufficient time to avoid unexpected expenses that is way beyond the set budget.
by Jackie Acosta
Travel and Luggage Packing Advice
For most people, traveling is one of life’s pleasures. It is a luxury that lets a person momentarily escape from the monotony of life on to another place with a completely different environment. It is an adventure, an experience and an opportunity to learn. More than anything, traveling is also one of the best ways to shake off stress and re-energize for what’s ahead! Being far from the comforts of a familiar surrounding has its dangers and disadvantages though, and for this reason one has to be prepared for possible mishaps! While traveling, one is subject to hundreds of external elements that can make or break a trip. A way to prevent a dream vacation from turning into a nightmare is to keep an emergency kit or a “travel must-haves” list that would enable a person to survive possible misfortunes that they have no control over.
Many suffer from one of the biggest and most common traveling tragedy of losing luggage. Airline personnel are subject to human error when it comes to the process of organizing check-in luggage, and this mistake normally results to having bags travel thousands of miles away from the intended location – along with the clothes and basic necessities of the poor traveler. Many have fallen victim to having to wear the same set of clothes (underwear and all) for days until their baggage arrives. For this reason, the first item in the travel checklist is having at least one change of clothes in the hand-carry luggage. Whatever happens, the traveler is assured that they will have a change of clothes upon arrival.
Basic necessities such as toiletries and medicines should also be placed in the hand-carry instead of the check-in luggage. In doing so, one must keep in mind that liquids and gels should not exceed the over-all limit of 100ml, as per the regulations of most airports around the world.
Another important item that must be in the hand carry luggage is a photo copy of the passport and visa. While the passport is kept in handbags that are always kept close to a person, it is also the main target of petty thieves who pick on tourists. Losing a passport is one of the most unfortunate events that can happen to a person while traveling, not having a photocopy of the passport would make it worse! Without a passport, a person cannot leave a country – event to go back home. Depending on the embassy and the country where the passport is lost, the time it would take to process a new passport varies from around 3 days to 3 weeks! Having a photocopy normally helps in speeding up the process and it may save legal troubles when emergency strikes.
Another must-have is a secret compartment for emergency money as well as at least 1 ATM and credit card. For obvious reasons, having cash on hand is essential in traveling so one must make sure that they cannot be without. There are available inner-shirt belt and neck bags that are great for keeping money safe.
Being in an unfamiliar surrounding is exciting but one never knows the possible troubles to come. It is always best take the words of Murphy: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”
by Jackie Acosta
