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Jet lag, hacked 🛬

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Greetings, friends -

Some of you may know that we’re currently traveling through the US to see some friends and family before heading to Canada for a family wedding ceremony.

This trip has probably been the best experience we’ve ever had with getting over jet lag (flying from HK to California), thanks to some strategies we'd been meaning to try for some time.

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After arriving in the US, our sleep schedule looked something like this:

First night: 10pm to 1pm

Second night: 12am to 5:30am

Third night: 11:30pm to 7:30ams0

At first glance, this schedule doesn’t look too impressive - but truthfully, the ability to stay awake into the evenings and maintain a somewhat regular sleep schedule after traveling 15h back in time was an actual blessing. Having a normal sleep schedule by the third night is even more rare. For reference, our usual jet lag for this trip causes our sleep to look more like the second night, every single night for an entire week.

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What changed this time around? The first thing we did was to change our clocks to PST time when we woke up in the morning for our flight out of HK. This helped us immediately switch our gears to thinking in terms of California time instead of HK time.

As much as possible while we were in transit, we tried to sleep when it was night time in California, and stay awake during the day. This meant losing some of our awake hours on the plane - but since we weren’t able to be very productive in transit anyways, it made more sense to try and get started with fixing our jet lag during the 15+ hours we were traveling (which included a brief, but wonderful, layover in Tokyo).

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The second thing was to start conducting ourself with reference to what time it was in PST, instead of in HK time. As a simple example, while we would ordinarily enjoy a coffee at the airport before our morning flight, we decided to skip the coffee since it would be the equivalent of having a coffee in the evening in California.

We considered our meal timings as well - one of the fascinating things we wanted to try in particular was timing our meals with reference to our target destination. This mostly meant not eating particularly late into the night, or particularly early in the day, and trying to stick to similar timings for breakfast/lunch and dinner that we ordinarily would adhere to at home.

Research by Satchin Panda has shown that our body’s individual organs and processes all have their own internal clocks (aka circadian rhythms). This includes our digestive system. The theory, therefore, is that by syncing our meal times with when we would ordinarily expect to eat at our target destination, we can overcome jet lag more quickly.

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Surprisingly, these small changes had a pretty significant impact on our jet lag. It's certainly not perfect, but we were pretty thrilled to be able to land and keep somewhat normal hours right from the get go.

If you're interested in learning more about Dr. Satchin Panda's research on circadian rhythms, check out his appearance on Huberman Lab here.

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Something Cool - A Gym in a Theatre 🎭

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The first leg of our US trip brought us to San Francisco.

We were looking for a local gym to buy a day pass at, and happened to come across one particular location that stood out due to the fact that it was located inside of an old theatre.

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The gym (which had somewhat darker, moodier lighting that one would expect inside of a theatre) was a specific branch of Crunch Fitness located on Polk St.

Turns out, the gym is located in Alhambra Theatre, which was designated as an official San Francisco landmark in 1996. Most of the interior of the theatre is undisturbed, with the exception that the bottom floor is filled with fitness equipment, while the mezzanine floor is filled with cardio machines. As an additional bonus (and as a nod to the history of the theatre in the performing arts), movies are played on a large screen (which is visible from most parts of the gym), and which each of the cardio machines are angled towards.

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We love finding and visiting cool local gyms when we travel, and this one definitely ranked up there with one of the most unique we've ever been to!

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