A Cure-All for Jet Lag? Try Caffeine and Naps - NYTimes.com

Caffeine and Naps

The best thing you can do is get outdoors.”

Dr. Rosekind underscored the need to get as much sleep as you can before and during travel. Get plenty of rest before the trip, he said, to avoid starting out with a “sleep debt” that compounds over the length of your stay. After arrival, take care to get enough sleep and ensure that your sleep will be uninterrupted — by staying in hotels, for example, that provide a quiet setting and heavy curtains to keep light out. And, he said, avoid drinking alcohol close to bedtime because it disrupts sleep patterns.

Some travelers swear by drugs like Provigil, a prescription medicine for narcolepsy that helps to hold off sleep. Dr. Moore-Ede warned that the use of such powerful medications has not yet been proved effective for sleep cycle adjustment; and the long-term effects are not known. Similarly, no research has yet proven that melatonin, a popular aid to resetting the clock, is effective for most people — partly because trying to adjust your circadian rhythms without having a deep understanding of your patterns before starting might just as well shift the rhythms by too much or not enough. “You have to know how to use it,” he said.

In fact, experts said, for most trips it might be best to make the most of the alertness you can muster when you need it. That comes down to “naps and caffeine,” Dr. Rosekind said. Studies of pilots showed that a 26-minute nap in flight — while a co-pilot took the controls, of course — increased performance by 34 percent and overall alertness by 54 percent.

Using simple caffeine to raise alertness in conjunction with naps during a trip is a winning strategy, Dr. Rosekind said. Caffeine takes 15 to 30 minutes to work, and an effective nap should be less than 45 minutes, to avoid going into the kind of deep sleep that leaves people groggy. So drinking a cup of coffee just before a nap, he said, can ensure that you will awaken with a little extra zip. The caffeine and nap working together “can actually show a performance boost greater than either one alone,” he said. “It’s not rocket sc