How Jet Lag Works

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from howstuffworks.com.

Welcome to the podcast.  I’m Josh Clark and with me is always Charles W. “Chuck” Bryant who just flew in to be here.

I was on the Concorde.   I was just in Paris, dude.

Dude, I’ve seen the Concorde at the air and space museum.  It’s not the one downtown D.C., but the one out by Dulles Airport at the new museum.  Oh, my God it’s awesome.  I wanted on board so bad because you’re standing right next to and underneath a Concorde; it’s cool.  They also have space shuttle Discovery and you are standing right next to that.  It’s a really neat museum.

Why did they end up grounding the Concorde?  Was it not cost efficient?

It wasn’t and anytime there was any kind of problem everyone died.

Really?

Oh, my God yeah.  Also, the US outlawed supersonic air travel.  You couldn’t fly across the interior of the continent, which cut out a lot of revenue source.  I don’t think Air France or British Airways ever even broke even in all those years.

On Concorde flights?

Yeah.  In 2003, there was that most recent crash and after that, that was it for the Concorde.

I think if I’m not mistaken my friend Justin, who you know, his mom when they had some final flights of the Concorde – Flight of the Conchords – she  went on one of those as just to do it I think.  I might be with that, but I seem to remember that from my past.

You could go from London to New York in five hours.

What is it usually like eight?

Yeah, eight or nine or something.   Do you remember when Phil Collins played Band Aid?  He played a show in London, got on a Concorde, flew to New York, and then played a show there in the same night.  That was pretty cool.

That was Live Aid.

Was it Live Aid?

Yeah, what’s the difference?

The one thing I knew is that it wasn’t Farm Aid.

Did Phil Collins play Farm Aid?

I don’t think so.  That was more Willie –

Willie, Mellencamp and Neil Young all those cats.

Phil Collins flying back and forth between London and New York to deliver his concert –

Thank God, that happened.

I love Phil Collins.

Do you really?

Oh yeah I do.   That wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for something called the Jet Age starting around the late 50s the jet  became the preferred mode of travel, which interestingly a ticket on a jet was actually less than a ticket on like a propeller piston engine plane.

Oh really at first?

Yeah, isn’t that interesting?  In the late 50s, we had McDonnell, Douglas and Boeing really kind of duking it out to create the jet to get people very quickly from one part of the country to another.  It opened up commercial air travel.  All of a sudden, you didn’t have to be the richest person in the world to get from New York to LA without having to drive or taking forever to get there – train, plane, whatever.

It emitted jet lab essentially.

Well, there you go.  Thanks for finishing my intro for me.

Well, we’ve been leaving time zones for less than 100 years so there are some beliefs that eventually we may evolve out of jet lag, but for now we haven’t been doing it long enough for our bodies to even know what the heck is going on.

It’s been like 50 or 60 years.  That’s pretty much what jet lag is.  Our body does not know what’s going on.  There’s another term for jet lag; it’s called desynchronosis.

That’s a great word for it.

Your body has the biological clock and when you  travel from one time zone to another in fairly short order your body gets out of sync with its environment.  Then all of a sudden all the cues it uses to regulate itself and all sorts of things that your body does, it gets out of sync.

What happens when you get out of sync?

There’s a lot of stuff that happens.  Chuck, I’m glad you asked that.  You can have cognitive problems, problems thinking and problem solving and just general mental problems.  Of course, they are temporary, but still you’re not thinking quite right.  You have health problems.  There’s a study in 2006 from the University of Virginia that found out that lab rats who were exposed to simulated jet lag, which is basically I think a D.C. to Paris flight once a week for I guess most of their lives probably, older ones died much more quickly than younger ones.

If you’re old, which I have noticed that my jet lag has gotten worse as I’ve aged, for sure.  I didn’t use to get to jet lagged at all.

Yeah, I didn’t know what the big problem was and now it’s one of the worst things that can ever happen to you.

Well, yeah – fatigue, alertness, irritability, disorientation, depression and gastrointestinal illnesses – it can really mess you up.

That comes from flying also.  You can get air gas which is the change in pressure creates gas.  It’s not like methane or anything.  It just like gas bubble in your gut.

Do you fart a lot on planes or after you get off the plane?

You can as a result.

You know what you should do people by the way?  I’m going to insert some flying etiquette here in there. Get up and go to the bathroom and fart.  Don’t fart in your seat.

Why are you looking at me?

Well because you’re across from me.

Oh, okay.

You know me and flying now.  It’s just so annoying to me because it’s like an 18th Century bus station these days when you’re flying.

Yeah, everybody’s wearing pajamas.

Teenage girls are wearing their boots – dress appropriately.

You don’t even have to dress up, but it’s like I don’t want to see what you look like in your living room.

Well, you take your shoes off which is something I’m hugely against.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  My feet do not smell.  If my feet smell and my shoes smelled, I wouldn’t take them off.  I’m very, very aware of that kind of thing.  It’s funny that you bring that up because the other night I watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which that movie really holds up.  John Candy takes his shoes off and he takes his socks off.  I thought I don’t take my socks off, but I thought of you because I know you that’s a terrible thing to do.

I just think you should remain fully clothed when you’re out in public like that.

I’m cool with taking the shoes off as long as the socks stay on and your feet don’t stink.  So, you're on a plane and you’ve got all these symptoms awaiting you.  If you are part of the 94 percent of Americans, you're going to get jet lag.

I wonder what’s going on with the 6 percent.

They're probably like younger people who don’t know what they're talking about.

You think?

Yes.

Interesting because it's biological.  I bet you there's something to that 6 percent besides you're five years old.

You think?

I doubt if they interviewed a lot of five year-olds about jet lag for this study.

Well, not five, but I mean when I was a late teenager I was like what's everyone’s problem with jet lag?  I don’t understand what they're talking about.  I specifically remember being interviewed in 1998 to ask if I got jet lab and I remember going like no of course not.

It is a problem; it’s unpleasant for some people.  If you're in the military or if you're some huge big shot CEO, they worry that it could impair you as a pilot, as a soldier or as a big thinker and the head of a company –

– or deal closer?

Yeah, you don’t want some jet lag CEO lady going in there and not making good decisions and making a bad deal.

How can you be a game changer, if you don’t have you’re A game on?

That’s gotta be the motto of some company.

I thought I just made it up.

It’s like you plugged somebody like Price Pfister or something.  What was the other study?  In 2010 the University of California they did a study of hamsters.  It said that on the health tip that the lab rats created new neurons at about half the rate of rats who didn’t fly.

That’s not good.

Your brain is literally not functioning as well as it should.

It’s not growing.

Nope.

I talked about that study about rats dying from being exposed to jet lag.  They’ve also found that in humans you can have a hard menstruation if you’re a lady.  You can develop heart disease and diabetes more readily.  Basically, your entire body is just totally thrown out of whack.  You're hungrier at weird times, you're just out of it, you just don’t feel good and stressed out.  You have a lot of stress hormones going.  What's going on Chuck?  What's jet lag?

We need to talk about the biological clock that we all have.  Basically, the article here describes it as grouping of interacting molecules and cells throughout the body. That’s a good way to say it.  Everything’s working together.  They tell our glands to release these hormones at this time of day to make you sleepy, melatonin, which we’ll get to in more detail, maybe adjust your body temperature a couple of hours before you're going to wake up so lets make you really hot for some reason.  The body is all in tuned with each other with all these things firing like a master timepiece.  Who wrote this anyway?  That’s a pretty good analogy.

This was Patrick Kiger.  He’s done some good stuff.

It’s a master timepiece.  There are 20,000 nerve cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus called the SCN to the front of the brain right near the optic nerve. That’s what keeps your circadian rhythm and your sleep and waking cycles going like clockwork.

That’s the biological clock the SCN.  It’s pretty neat.  The fact that it’s located by the optic nerve is kind of telling.  One of the ways that it’s sets itself it's on a set cycle of 24.65-hour cycle.   Since it’s off a little bit, it uses cues to reset itself.  One of the big cues it uses is natural light.

Some people think the brain is super photosensitive and that light really is the key to everything there.

The pineal gland apparently, even though it’s buried inside the brain, is very light responsive.  The pineal gland makes melatonin, which has to do with sleep cycles.

Melatonin is the good sleepy time stuff.

This whole rhythm, the 24.65-hour cycle, is called the circadian rhythm.  When it’s time to sleep when it's about the time that you went to sleep the night before and it's dark out your brain’s melatonin production increases.  Also, you’ve been building up in your head all day the stuff called the dena sign.  They’ve recently found it’s been linked to being sleepy or what’s called sleep pressure.

You know when you try to stay up, you're just getting sleepier and sleepier and it's harder and harder to resist?  That experience is called sleep pressure and they think that’s a dena sign responsible for that.  It accumulates in the brain until finally about the time that you should be falling asleep, the sleep pressure is just too much to overcome and you fall asleep.

Emily’s family, my Ohio family, has a lot of sleep pressure. We call it the yearly gas leak over the holidays.  We all look up at 7:45, we’ll be watching TV and everybody’s asleep.

– after a big turkey dinner or something like that?

Well after drinking all day and eating and stuff like that.  It’s all warm and toasty.  I get it, but it's still kind of funny when it's called the gas leak.

You just made me feel so cozy in that description.

It is in a very cozy household.

You got the melatonin production increase, you got a dena sign built up and you reach that sleep pressure threshold.  All of this stuff is kind of going on this general pattern that’s attuned to you and your rhythms.  Are you a night owl?  Do you like to get up early?  Do you like to sleep in late?  This is your own circadian rhythm.

Yeah, if you mess any of that up without flying, you're going to be thrown out of sorts.  If you're a night owl and all of a sudden, you get a job where you gotta get up super early, it's going to suck for a little while until your body adjusts.

It’s going to suck for a while.  It takes a while for the body to adjust.  Also, we’ve never really, except for the last 60 years, never really had the capability of exposing the body to a sudden shock of just falling out of rhythm like that.

– like I’m flying to Australia?

Right exactly – where’s there a 12 or 13-hour difference.

I've done the Europe thing, but I've never experienced jet lag to that degree.  I imagine it would take me quite a while to adjust.  It sucks because it takes away a percentage of your vacations almost.

It definitely does.  When Umi and I went to Japan and got there we flew east to west because we flew up and over Canada and down Russia, which is easier.  Even when we got there, it was like 3:00 in the morning and we’re just wide awake.  That took a very little while to adjust.  When we flew west to east on the way back it took two solid weeks of being almost like clinically out of our minds before we got back on our sleep patterns.

Actually, you were pretty whacky then.

Do you remember?

Oh, yeah.

There was a period where the first four days when we got up we’d both wake up in the middle of the night.  We wouldn’t even talk we’d just get up, go out to the car, drive to Krystal, eat some Krystal’s, go back home and go to bed.  We’ve never done that before and haven’t done it since, but we did it for four nights in a row because of jet lag.  We were doing stuff like that all the  time.  Going from east to west is the worst. That was a 13-hour time difference.

What do they call that?  It's a phase delay going east to west and a phase advance going west to east.

It's like you can look at it like if you're looking at a clock and bedtime is a set time, in phase delay you're just taking that hour hand and moving it back so you're just putting off your bedtime a little longer.  With phase advance you're moving that hour hand closer suddenly to your bedtime, even though your body isn’t ready to sleep it’s bedtime now.

It’s just interesting that the body – it makes sense I guess.

What I find interesting is that we figured out a way to technologically and artificially subject the body to this kind of shock in that it responds the way that it does.  It starts like over producing this hormone or under producing that hormone and you go crazy.

Since you mentioned it, that’s one of the things that happen. It literally disrupts biological functions.  It releases stress hormones, drives up your blood pressure, sends inflammation stimulating chemical markers through your arteries.  It’s going to mess up your appetite like you said because you're use to eating at regular times and that’s why you were eating Krystal because that was probably dinner time in Japan I guess.

Haven’t you ever noticed when you get up early like you have an early flight or something –  Like you can get up at a normal time.  If you normally get up at 8:00 and maybe you're a little hungry or whatever, but you could skip breakfast; it's not a big deal.  If you're up and moving around at 6:00 or something like that, for some reason you're just starving.  Hasn’t that ever happened to you?

Yeah, I'm usually not super hungry in the morning regardless of what time I wake up.

If I'm up really early, I'm ravenous for some reason.

I also find and I've always wondered what this was, that I'm not as hungry if I don’t eat anything, but if I have a banana, then it just makes me super hungry.

Have you noticed if you have red meat the night  before whenever you get up the next day you're just ravenous too?  That happens to me.

I don’t eat a lot of red meat anymore.

You don’t?

It’s just because Emily doesn’t, but I’ll still have my steak every now and then.

What are you eating these days?

The same thing I've always been eating since I've been with Emily, which is a lot of chicken, turkey and fish.

What kind of fish?

It depends.  I will make tilapia tacos, grilled salmon or what’s the more flaky, not mahi, but I’ll mahi too, the flounder.  I'll just go to the farmer’s market and get what looks good and fresh.

They just took mackerel off the safe to eat or fine to eat environmentally list.

Oh, really.  I didn’t know it was on that.  I love tuna of course.  You shouldn’t eat a lot of tuna either.

How come?

– I think the mercury.

I eat a lot of raw tuna.

They say that Jeremy Piven supposedly had some sort of mercury poisoning from eating too much sushi.  He had to back out of some movie or show because of it, but then later on they said no, I think he was using that as an excuse and it wasn’t verified that he had mercury poisoning.

That’s a lot like the Twinkie defense.

Yeah, Jeremy Piven had the tuna defense.  That’s why did say if you're pregnant you shouldn’t eat a lot of sushi.  That was a sidetrack.  I think I’m hungry is what the deal is.

Yeah, I am too.

Why is it so difficult to overcome Josh?

Your body’s circadian rhythm is not exactly 24 hours; it's 24.65 hours.  Every day you're ready for sleep a little later, a little later and a little later.  That’s why, at least Patrick Kiger thinks, it's easier to adjust going from east to west because that means you're going to have to stay up later to hit your normal bedtime.  Since we’re already kind of doing that it's not that big of a deal.

It's not just him; I think that’s proven like NASA says the same thing.

– well, NASA and Patrick Kiger.

Another reason is, it’s not just light, body temperature we said fluctuates.  It’s minimum temperature – oh, I'm sorry I thought it was maximum three hours before you get up.

No, Tmin.

It’s minimum temperature.  I thought you got really hot right before you woke up.

You might, but Tmin is typically three hours before you're normally awake.  They found that if you have to wake up during Tmin when you're body is normally use to being at Tmin that’s when your jet lag is the absolutely worst.  I think it's because that’s a cue that your whole body has, okay, we’re still in deep sleep and we’re going to be in a while and then all of a sudden it’s like I have to wake up and go to this meeting.  Your body is whacked out of its normal process of waking.

I wonder sometimes if I get up super early I have a harder time warming up through the day.  I wonder if that makes a difference.

I would bet it does.

It’s like if you're use to waking up at a certain body temperature.

Yeah.  You know what takes care of that no matter whatever single time, no matter why you're cold or how cold you are, go spend 15 minutes in a sauna and you’ll be right as rain.  It’s just a miracle wood box.

I do that with the hot shower, with the steam.

Sometimes it doesn’t take with me.  I'll still get out of the shower and I’m chilled to the core still.

How long are you in there?

I'll stay in there for a while and really try to heat up.  Most of the time it will get my temperature up some, but with the sauna it's like resetting it back to your normal setting every time.

You're kind of cold though for a man.  You're often chilly when I’m not and I know I'm super hot.

You're very hot.

I think you're also a little cold.  Put us together and we make a very well adjusted human body temperature-wise.  Ask anyone what their remedy is for jet lag and you’ll get ten different answers.  Ask ten different people and you get ten different answers.  That’s what you say.  Ask Bruce Willis – what’s he going to say?  “Make fists with your toes.”  It’s always been one of my favorite things.  I've tried it and it’s silly.  Of course, it doesn’t work, but I just do it now because it was in Die Hard.

Argyle told him to do that.

No, it was the guy on the plane.

I thought it was Argyle, the driver.

It was on the plane as they were flying in.  Of course in Die Hard, it was just a set up to get him without shoes and socks on because that played a part in the movie.

That was a good movie – the first one.

I said some people use herbal remedies and some people take melatonin, which is not FDA approved, but you can take synthetic melatonin.

We should say this article tells you how much to take and when and we’ll tell you too, but we should also add a disclaimer.  Melatonin has interactions with drugs like diabetes drugs, blood thinners, and birth control pills.  You may want to check out what melatonin might do with our medication before you take it.

You definitely should.  Some people just say I’m going to take a red eye and I’m going to take some Valium, drink some scotch, just knock myself out for the whole flight and that’ll do the trick.

That works if you want to die.  There’s a 36 year-old woman who recently died of a stroke and she was otherwise healthy apparently, but she passed out on a seven-hour flight or went to sleep or whatever.  She slept for seven hours on a flight and developed thrombosis, which is a blood clot.  Apparently, it went from probably her leg to her brain.

Again, when we went to Japan on I think Japan Airlines they make you get up.  They’re like it’s plane stretching time and they show you how to do it like sitting down at your seat, but they're also why don’t you get up too and walk around.  You kind of have to because you can develop a fatal blood clot just from sitting on a plane because of the change of pressure and just sitting for that long.

You're not suppose to sleep in a sitting position.  The body is meant to be horizontal and prone.

That’s just for rich people on a flight.

Like up in first class now where they have the sleepers.  They’re so obnoxious.  They should put first class in the back so you don’t have to walk through that scene.

The funniest is when they have the gauzy curtains separating first class and coach.  It’s like I see that you're having a salad.  Give me some of that salad.

That hot towel looks nice.  There are all kinds of home remedies and little wives tales of what you can do.  If you're an expert, if you're in NASA or if you’re Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, you’d have some real advice like gradually adjusting your circadian rhythm actually using a light box which is a lot of effort, but I bet it works.

It does – It also works for seasonal affective disorder.  I came across a paper and I’ll Tweet it out, post it on Facebook or something or blog about it – we’ll do something with it – because I couldn’t get it in time to really speak about it.  There’s this guy who came up with a paper that’s basically like a computational method for offsetting jet lag and figuring out how to adjust your schedule accordingly.

It is like this in the article?

Yeah, that’s the impression that I have, but it's really detailed.  Basically, Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center researchers say what you want to do is you're going from west to east which is the devil one you want to start going to bed an hour earlier every day.  Maybe five days before your trip you want to start going to bed an hour earlier.

Not just an hour earlier across the board, but earlier, earlier and earlier to where right before your trip you're going to bed about five hours earlier.  If you're going to take melatonin and you’ve done all your research, you want take a half a milligram of melatonin four and a half hours before bedtime.  You want to progressively push that time earlier and earlier in the day as you're going to bed earlier and earlier at night and when you wake up blast yourself with the light box.

Well, east to west you want to not blast yourself with light.  You want to wear sunglasses in the morning and avoid light in the morning.

They say use the light box at your normal bedtime and stay up later.

Right, which makes sense.

It sounds pretty tortuous.

It does.  There’s a New York Times article called A Battle Plan for Jet Lag.  They’ve done a study with major league baseball actually because they travel a lot.  They said that over a two-year span teams that went eastward gave up an average of one extra run per game – Isn’t that interesting?  They say, which is not really a wives tale with NASA confirming it, it takes about one day per light per time zone to get back into that rhythm in general.  They say the same thing.  You’ve gotta regulate your exposure to light.  When you get in that hotel room if you're traveling east, you gotta exposure yourself to light early and advance that clock.

If you’re traveling west, expose yourself to light at dusk in the early part evening and delay that clock.  They say close the curtains, put a towel over your clock radio and get it as dark as possible.  Don’t look at any computer screens and laptops.  They say you shouldn’t eat a big meal or spicy food the first day you get there.  Don’t dive right into that vacation because that can mess you up as well, gastrointestinally speaking.

The CDC says they don’t have any suggestions other than eat a balanced diet and make sure you get some exercise.  It’s like of course you're going to say that CDC.  You have any other suggestions and they say yes, wear loose clothing on the flight.

They say avoid alcohol and caffeine on the flight and afterward.  They say that first day on vacation you shouldn’t be hitting the alcohol hard either because that will just mess up your sleep period.  Have you heard of this thing called the Valkee?

No.

A team of scientists in Finland invented this thing because their belief is that the brain is about photosensitivity.  It’s sort of like an iPod, but instead of the earplugs, it emits light through your ear canal directly to the brain.  They said it works.  They tested 350 subjects over four years and found that there’s definitely brain activity when the little Valkee is on and nine out of ten subjects felt reduction in stress, seasonal depression, and anxiety.

They’re using it for winter blues, PMS, jet lag, migraines and all sorts of stuff.  I don’t know how much it is though.  I'm curious if it's the price of an iPod or just the size of an iPod.  I would try it though.  I get pretty bad jet lag.  That’s like when we go to do events now I try to fly out a day early just to sort of adjust.

Oh, my gosh that’s neat.  I can do east coast to west coast, as it doesn’t hit me that bad.  It’s more like international that gets me.  I haven’t had it very bad.  When we went to the TCA, I didn’t seem out of sorts there or back.

I get a little out of sorts, but not super bad.

I’m glad Chuck.  You got anything else?

I got nothing else.

That was jet lag everybody.  That kind of goes in with our sleeping sweep.  We’ve done a bunch of those, like how much sleep do you really need.  What was the one about the sleep aid?  Remember the sleep aid, like you could stay up for 48 hours without any sleep?  I don’t remember the title of that one.

Who wants to do that?  I love my sleep.

That was a good episode though.  A lot of people wish that you didn’t have to sleep I would imagine.

Not me.

I'm with you.  I like to sleep too.  If you want to hear any of those, you can go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com, and click on the podcast page and just start searching – go to town.  You're going to find some cool stuff.  If you want to read this article how jet lag works, go to howstuffworks.com and in the search bar type jet lag and it will bring up this fine article.  I said search bar so it's time for listener mail.

Josh, I call this a very sweet email from Wendy and I'll be reading some of it and summarizing some of it as it’s super long.  She starts out, “Congratulations on the launch of your TV show.  I've been reading [inaudible] and I hope it's going comfortably for you behind the scenes because you hear these reactions.

It's a bummer when those weird people on the block who mow the law naked or pride themselves of not being tricked into attending college think that they’re are qualified critics.  Hopefully, you’re all through experience by now to do more than laugh at the losers and just keep doing what you enjoy.”  I told her that was very nice and it came at a good time.  People can be mean.

People have been kind of mean, but we have pretty thick skin.  We’ve been doing this for years.

We have the armor on.  That was very nice Wendy.  She has been meaning to write in for several years to thank us.  She started listening after she moved from Seattle to Burbank in 2008, and it was a pretty depressing time for her she said.  She’s a stay at home mom and we really got her through that time.  A year later, she moved to Utah.  She kept downloading because Chuck was on board, which is nice, and “It was like having my brothers around for an hour or so every day.”

That was really nice.  She said, “It was clear by that point even if we didn’t know each other, that you guys would probably be friends of mine if we knew each other.  You would not only appreciate the wild cultural from Hollywood to Salt Lake City, but also be more fascinated than turned off by my strange family connections.”  She didn’t explain what that meant.

– very mysterious.

Then she moved from Utah to Massachusetts.  She was eight months pregnant and we really helped her through that so she’s super appreciative of that.  Then she says this, “A long time ago you had a many-sided conversation about what romance meant.

It seemed to conclude that it was guys who had a manly friend crush on another guy that they knew and they really enjoyed hanging out with.”  I don’t think we invented that.  That’s commonly what romance is known as.  “I may be a woman, but I do have a major friend crush on you guys.  You filled in for the awesome friends and family that I've missed intelligently shooting the breeze almost five years now.”

That was really nice.

She’s moving around and we’ve helped her out substituting for her smart friends.  Keep podcasting and take care of yourselves.  You know that in the Zombie Apocalypse I definitely have your backs.  By the way, my weapon of choice would be an iron-aged Scandinavian sax in one hand, a long handled ax in the other and a shotgun I could carry across my back.  Wendy, you are well armed; my lady, and you would be right by our sides.

Thanks for that Wendy.  We’re glad we could help you through the last five years.  Can you believe it been five years?

Pretty soon.

I saw a Tweet from a listener that said that they were off to college and they started listening in eighth grade.

Also, Sarah our amazing 11 year-old [inaudible] is now15.

She’s going to be driving soon.

I’m going fix her up with my nephew.  To bad they don’t live in the same state.

We’re living in the jet age Chuck.

That’s true.

If you want to tell us how we helped you out or helped you through some rough times or just there for you, like the pals we are, we always want to hear that kind of thing.  You can Tweet to us at SYSK Podcast.  How about this?  You can also tell us any of your jet lag remedies.

Yeah, I’d like to hear them.

You can join us on facebook.com/stuffyoushouldknow.com, send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and check us out on the web.  We have a new home – our very own website.  It’s appropriately called www.stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com.

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35 minutes