Westlag — Pro Tips To Jetlag Productively

Jetlag sucks.

But jetlag isn't created equal. It's easy to stay up six hours later, but it's impossible to fall asleep six hours earlier.

Going westwards is easy. Going eastwards is hard. Really hard.

Arising from the legends of traveling Starcraft pro-gamers who need to be in top-tier shape, I developed my own jetlag method. I don't get extreme jetlags. I'm always in a productive state when traveling. As a quirk, I get more total time out of my life.

I found that this westlagging reframe is obvious to many jetlag pros, but there's little public information on this. If you're already fluent in converting advances to delays: Stop reading.

If you want a detailed walkthrough, then this is for you. Remember, people are different and your mileage may vary (pun intended).

General Jetlag Methods

Before explaining how to westlag, here's a summary of other core jetlag methods:

• Be young. That makes all jetlags easier, westwards or eastwards.

• Before arrival, adjust to the target timezone ahead of time. Slowly change your sleep schedule towards it.

• After arrival, get lots of light at the beginning of the day.

• After arrival, get little light at the end of the day.

• After arrival, eat at the same time you'd eat at home.^[1]

• Always stay hydrated. Drink lots.

• Consider supplementing melatonin, glycine, ashwagandha. Maybe lavender oil and maybe maybe magnesium.^[2]

This old pro-gamer article is a great introduction to the basics (link, archived). Google has plenty of introductions too. Read those for general tips and implement them. Here, I'm only expanding on the core idea of westwards jetlagging.

Key principles of westlagging

• Note that East is a beast, west is best

  • Because it's much easier to sleep later than to sleep early.

• Take the journey to the west — Treat any long journey as if you were going west.^[3]

  • E.g. going from Los Angeles to Berlin, don't think of going to bed 9 hours early. Reframe it as sleeping 15 hours later.

• Before, sleep latest: Stay up later in your original timezone in the days before leaving.

  • E.g. sleep at 05:00 instead of 02:00. This reduces a 15h westwards jetlag to 11 hours.

  • If you sleep badly on planes: Sleep as late as you can at home. Book a late flight.

• After, sleep earliest: Go to bed early in your destination local timezone.

  • After arriving, go to bed soon after the sun has set. This reduces an 11h west jetlag to 6 hours.

That's the heart of it. It's fairly simple. And it makes eastward travel shockingly easy.

I'll illustrate how this works out with some concrete examples. In addition to making eastward travel substantially easier, these methods also make any westward jetlags easier.

East is a beast, west is best

Example 0: Going west means that your natural bedtime will be before the actual destination local time. Say you're used to sleeping at 23:00.^[4] In the afternoon, you fly from Boston to San Francisco, which is a -3h time difference. Later, it's 23:00 local time in San Francisco, but you're not even close to tired: Only by 2:00 your natural melatonin and sleep cycle kick in. Going west, your sleep is 3 hours delayed.

This is quite easy to manage for most people. Many just drink an extra coffee, deal with the little bits of grogginess and move on. But once you're flying back from San Francisco to Boston, you're faced with trying to sleep 3 hours earlier than usual. When going east your sleep is advanced. Sleeping 3 hours earlier is really hard for most people.

Especially on farther distances, going eastwards is unusually brutal. Most jetlag horror stories are about going east between continents. Traveling from the US to Europe would often rip my well-being to pieces for a few days. Personally, I'd much, much rather drink a few cups of coffee to stay up longer than miserably try to fall asleep wide-awake 5 hours too early. Advances tend to be harder than delays. East is a beast, west is best.

Why not always jet-lag westwards?

Treat any jetlag as going west

Example 1: Consider a long flight eastwards, say San Francisco to London. This is an 8-hour time difference. In the eastwards frame of mind, I'd have to go to bed 8 hours earlier once I arrive in London. Instead, I treat it as a westward jetlag. So I'd have to stay up 16 hours longer. My day was just a lot longer.^[5]

Now, staying up 16 hours longer is quite a bit. But going westwards I now have more effective levers at my disposal. I can make this an easy and reasonable jetlag:

Before, sleep latest

Preparing for a long flight eastwards, I sleep late.

In example 1: Say, my sleep cycle in San Francisco might be to sleep at 02:00 and wake at 10:00.^[6] Now, it's 3 to 5 days before this flight from San Francisco to London, I sleep later and later. By the day before the flight, my sleep cycle is from 05:00 to 13:00. A really late sleep cycle.^[7]

Note:

• It's crucial to get good sleep before travelling, so I'll make sure to actually get those 8 hours despite the shifted schedule. If I'm struggling to sleep through, supplementing melatonin and glycine helps. Some people use prescription sleep medication. If I can oversleep on the day before the flight, I do it (e.g. 05:00 until 15:00).

• I don't like to sleep on planes, so it's important for me to take one of the latest flights available that day. In this case, I would never buy a ticket for a morning or afternoon flight to London: I'd just be waking up, and gathering my stuff to leave by that time. Only afternoon or evening times, like our 17:00 flight.

Now, I'll leave San Francisco at 17:00 Pacific Time on the 11-hour United Airlines UA930 flight. I'll arrive some 11 hours later, which is 04:00 Pacific Time or 12:00 noon London GMT (+8 hours time difference). I've been awake for some 13-15 hours, and I'm feeling great.

By the time I walk out of the airport it's 13:00 London Time. If I wanted to go to sleep at the local time as my original sleep cycle (02:00), I'd have to stay up for 13 hours longer than usual. That's better than staying awake for 16 hours longer, but still not super convenient. By 02:00 London Time, I'd be incredibly tired.

But I don't need to sleep that late.

After, sleep earliest

Of course, I want to adapt to a reasonable local time as soon as possible. So, I arrive and stay up until the early evening local time. Then, I simply sleep early.

Continuing example 1: After arrival, I have another 8 hours to explore London, meet people, and go home. Then I go to bed at 20:00 London Time, which is a lot earlier than my sleep cycle in the US (05:00). Usually I've had a last coffee on the plane, so it'll be easy to stay up for another 8 hours in London. In my original timezone, or what is currently still my body's natural timezone, this is 12:00 Pacific Time --- it was a day ago when I woke up. I've been awake for 23 hours.

Sleeping late in my original timezone meant I'm shaving off 3 hours off the 16 hour westwards jetlag. Alongside going to bed early in my new timezone (shaving off 6h from the 02:00 baseline), I was only awake for 7 hours longer than usual.

To put this into perspective, 7 hours is roughly the same jetlag as going from London back to California (8h). For most people, staying up longer for 7 hours is substantially easier than going to bed 8 hours earlier. Of course, it's still a little tiring. But it's manageable. I reduced an impossible jetlag of sleeping 8 hours early to an easy 7 hours later.

A quick test in case you are confused about whether you westlagged or eastlagged: If you spent more than 16 hours awake between proper long chunks of sleep (typically: some 24 hours awake, allowing for some brief naps), then you westlagged. If you spent less than 16 hours awake between proper sleep (typically: 12-14 hours awake) then you eastlagged.^[8]

This is the westlagging method. A hard eastwards jetlag can be an easy westwards jetlag.

Example: China-America Flight

Example 2: Flying from Shanghai to New York: Instead of thinking about it 12 hours eastwards, think about it as 12 hours westwards.[ˆ11]

In Shanghai, I'd start sleeping late. The days before the flight, I go to bed at 04:00 local time and wake up at 12:00. Then I'd grab a flight in the afternoon or evening, say at 14:00. Some layovers and 18 hours later, I'd arrive in New York (at 8:00 China Time = 20:00 Eastern Time). I can literally directly head home and sleep at 21:00! All in all, I stayed up 5 hours longer --- which is a very, very manageable westwards jetlag.

Timetravelling

I'm a big fan of westlagging. Besides the fact that it just works well for me, my favorite benefit of westlagging is that it will give you a little more time in your life.

Whenever you go westwards, say from London to New York, you gain some 8 hours in your day. Of course, those vanish when you go back: That day is shortened by having to go to bed earlier. The expected time gain is zero. But as someone who almost always westlags, I always gain time when traveling. Every single time I travel, I have days which are up to 32 hours long. I don't pay those back, ever, because on any major journey I'd westlag. My expected time gain is positive: Every time I travel back and forth between continents, I gain maybe 15-16 wakeful hours in expectation. That's a full day in wakefulness hours.

Yes, I know, you're probably thinking "Due to excessive sleepiness you're at least experiencing a 50% DALY discount for those marginal hours, at least halving their EV. And what about a loss of peak-quality hours based Newport's power-lawed productivity? And what about long-term nth-order sequelae?!"

Yes, great point. One might argue that the gained time is paid for by feeling groggy. Certainly, the 20th hour of being awake isn't as great as the 3rd hour. But, try it: For most, that 20th hour is still a pretty high-quality time. Especially if I made sure to sleep well, nap well, and drink coffee earlier. It's more like working a little late on a Monday.

Jetlag is unnatural and disruptive either way, so I'd be surprised if the long-term health consequences of westlagging drastically outweighed normal jetlagging methods.

A fun Fermi estimate: With my family in Austria, my PhD in the USA, and my friends in Asia, I fly across major time differences maybe 4-5 times a year. Traveling one direction I gain 7-9 hours, so say 4 * 2 * 8 hours a year. If my lifespan was a hundred years, and this kept up for another 80 years, I'd gain 4 * 2 * 8 * 80 / 24 ~= 213 days in my life. It's unlikely I'd keep up such a schedule for 80 years, as well as factoring some quality discount and excess sleep needs. So in total, it's plausible this gain might still be some 100 days or so. I've already gained a counterfactual ~10 days from westlagging just in the recent 3 years!

I drink lots of coffee when I travel, so I'm not that tired when westlagging. I never watch entertainment shows on the plane screen, so I'm usually highly productive on a plane and in airports. All-in-all, every time I travel I gain a full, pretty productive day in my life.

I think that's pretty neat.

Naps

I allow myself to nap whenever on travel days. In fact, one or two brief naps seem to make everything go smoother. The most important bit is to not enter deep sleep in naps. Waking up from deep sleep is that feeling like you were hit by a truck and can't even remember what century you're in.

So, I always make sure to have a 30 minute alarm on. Also, I try to not nap in the last 6 hours before sleep. As everything, this varies between people, and self-experimentation is required to figure out what works for you.

Never sleep on planes

I never sleep on planes.

I can't sleep well on planes. My quality of sleep goes to nil. I always book eastward flights in the afternoon or evening, so I'm awake the entire journey. I'd rather book a cheap hotel near an airport and sleep there for a night instead of taking a flight which would force me to sleep on a plane.

This makes sure that anytime I sleep, it's in a cool, dark, and quiet place. High-quality sleep. Not on a plane --- which is the opposite of all of these. Yikes. Higher quality sleep also makes any jetlag much easier. The benefits of feeling great and being productive are well-worth any additional hotel cost. Having slept well, I prefer to work or study or just daydream on a plane. Everything but sleep.

Note that 30-minute naps are fine.

In theory, if you actually sleep well on planes, you could adapt westlagging for that. You could take extremely early morning flights (say 06:00) and just sleep on the plane. That's not something I can comment on.

Reservations

People are different.^[9]

Human biology is weird.

Some people sleep whenever they want.

Some think they can sleep whenever they want, but they don't notice how badly they impact their sleep.

Some people are zombies for a week after a small 3-hour jetlag.

Travelling long distances so quickly is a modern-day miracle. Unnatural. Both ways of jetlagging have their downsides. Westlagging on eastward flights is a bit of a trade-off between whether you'd like to be a little tired when staying up longer, or whether you prefer to wrestle yourself to sleep, way too early for your body. Can you sleep well on planes? Do you have sleep medication at hand that allows you to sleep whenever? Do you prefer to fight tiredness or insomnia?

This will not work well for everyone. I personally sleep long and well, even if I stay up long. I don't wake up too early. My girlfriend wakes up early like clockwork, irrespective of whether she went to sleep barely 3 hours before. I sleep badly on planes, she sleeps like a rock. Anecdotally, westlagging worked best for me and friends with similar profiles: Once you're asleep, you sleep well for 7-9 hours.

Others prefer not to westlag: In the words of one OpenAI employee, he'd rather try to sleep early when going eastwards, and "just take a zopiclone [sleep medication] and get over it". I personally think that is a recipe for disaster for most people.

Also note that westlagging stops making sense for short eastwards flights. For example, it would make no sense to westlag when going from the US West Coast to the East Coast. That's a 3-hour time difference. Sleeping a full 3 hours early is still pretty hard for most people, but it'll fix itself. For me personally, a 8-hour time difference or more on an eastern flight makes westlagging worth it.

I suspect westlagging is usually the best strategy for long flights, for most people. Granting this idea a better epistemic basis would require a proper clinical trial, of course.

Until then, I love to take the journey to the west.