When’s the last time you felt jet lag – really felt it, your bones and your mind refusing to believe that it’s mid-morning and not the dead of night? Your muscles are screaming out – why are we not in bed? Or why are we in bed?
Last month, I was in Australia for work, a whopping 14-hour time difference from my home in Virginia on the East Coast. And all that travel indeed affected my body’s natural clock. At 6pm in Australia, I was feeling the call of bedtime, then shooting wide awake at 1am. And now that I’m home, 9am can feel downright fatiguing.
So yes, there’s a clear physiological downside to time zone differences – just ask my Whoop band. I’m sure my fitness tracker is quite upset with what I’ve put my body through on this work trip.
But… I can’t help but feel that there was something quite amazing about throwing my daily schedule off by 14 hours. Hear me out.
Routine is a good thing, a really good thing for me. When I’m back home in Virginia, there’s a plan for when I wake up. There’s a transition plan to move from my morning routine to work mode. There’s a lunch time, a Diet Coke break, a plan for how to finish work for the day, for when it’s time for me to go to bed. These habits become almost ritualized, enforced, and ingrained, from a regular alarm clock to your usual spot for lunch.
Again, routines are great. But when our days roll through regular protocols, it’s easy to take them for granted, immovable, unchanging. We can cling to routine, consciously or unconsciously.
And then flying halfway across the world throws that all out of whack. Fourteen hours has a way of shaking up that Etch-A-Sketch, taking apart the Lego tower we call a regular day. So in Australia, I started thinking – how could I spend my day differently?
Do I really need to start or stop working at a specific time? Where did that deadline even come from in the first place? Why is my tennis practice so ritualized on a certain day? Why do I always fit dinner into an hour – why not 3 or 4 hours? Why not read a novel at 1am?
Time zone differences are a beautiful opportunity, not just to throw everything up in the air (in a positive way), but to examine each routine when they fall back down, picking up each Lego piece and asking yourself if it serves you to keep this up anymore.
And then there’s the moment in between, the suspension of time mid-air – literally, sometimes, as you sit in your aisle seat, or wait at the baggage carousel, or try to find an available outlet to charge your laptop in the airport. Totally unmoored from routine, from familiar surroundings, floating in the timelessness of Gate B23. In those moments, we’re able to introspect in a way that we can’t when the world around us is constantly reminding us of who we are, or who we think we are.
So, to summarize, we should strive to see the disruption of travel as an opportunity to take a couple of steps closer to ourselves, rather than bemoaning how heavy your eyelids feel at 9am when you get back home. Sometimes all we need is a bird’s-eye perspective on our lives down on the ground.
Best,
Whitney