Making up for lost (and gained) time

Some lucky people aren't affected by jet lag. I'm not one of the lucky ones, however, as our recent trip to Germany reminded me. I always sleep well the first night, no doubt due to my lack of sleep on the plane. But for days afterward, I either am unable to fall asleep at bedtime or awake in the middle of the night and cannot fall back to sleep for hours.

I never really adjusted to the local time in Germany and had difficulty sleeping up until our last night there--6 nights into the trip. "This is unacceptable," I told myself. I had to try something else for Spain, and sleeping pills seemed to be the way to go.

Rick swears by taking 1/4 Ambien when he travels, and I was willing to give it a try. But then B kindly reminded me of the side effects of some of these prescription drugs--sleep walking, sleep driving, and sleep eating, to name a few.

Which would be worse? Wandering around a hotel in a foreign country in my sleep, or eating the entire contents of the extremely expensive mini-fridge in the hotel room, also in my sleep? That's a question that I hope I'll never have to answer. Perhaps I ought to try some non-prescription options before moving on to anything that comes with a lengthy list of warnings.

The first "natural" option is the Ant-Jet-Lag Diet. Three days before you leave, you start a feast/fast routine. Say you leave on Monday. Friday is a feast day; Saturday is a fast day; Sunday is a feast day; and Monday (departure day) is a fast day. On feast days, you eat a lot of high-protein food for breakfast and lunch and carbs for dinner. On fast days, you eat smaller, high-protein meals. You can drink coffee only between 3 PM and 5 PM each day. And then somehow, magically, you have no jet lag when you arrive. I'm not sure if I'm convinced, but it can't hurt to try. You might want to steer clear of me during the fast days, however--I'm not that much fun to be around when I'm hungry.

Another option, which my pharmacist recommended, sort of, was melatonin. Research indicates that it may be useful for some people for fighting jet lag (or rather, for helping you sleep when you can't, which is how jet lag rears its ugly head for me). I am highly skeptical of vitamins and supplements, which are not regulated by any government agency and frequently do not contain what they advertise. However, given the risks associated with sleeping pills, I think melatonin is the better of two risky options. I'll ask my pharmacist for a recommendation of the best brand to get.

The plot is slightly thicker--of course. Yesterday I realized that Daylight Savings Time, which starts three weeks earlier in the US than in most of the rest of the world, will have started in the US but not in Spain when we leave--that means that Spain will be only 5 hours ahead of us when we arrive (I think). A five-hour time difference should be easier to adapt to, in theory. And then Daylight Savings Time will begin in Spain while we're there, and the difference between the time zones will be 6 hours, as expected. It'll be nice to have more light at night, though the idea of "losing" an hour on our vacation is a little sad. Maybe I can call the airline and ask to extend our trip by a day, to make up for our lost time...