In our recent move from Costa Rica to Japan, I experienced jet lag induced insomnia for the first time in my life. This was my first time experiencing any sort of extended insomnia. I severely underestimated how bad this would impact me. My guess was that I would sleep really badly for a night, then sleep ok the next night, and be fine from there on. The reality is that I was wrecked for an entire week.

This really should not have been such a surprise seeing as how we went through one of the worst time change scenarios possible. We traveled west to Japan, and west travel across time zones is generally easier because you gain time. However, we crossed the international date line. That effectively made our travel as if we traveled east through almost every possible time zone. The net effect was gaining 15 hours in clock time. I read that it can take a day to recover for each time zone crossed, so my sleep struggles weren’t unusual by any means.

During this hell week I started having mental spirals that I imagine regular insomnia sufferers experience. I have a lot of sympathy now for anyone going through that on a regular basis. Those negative thoughts involved a carousel of these types of things:

• This lack of sleep is going to lead to more lack of sleep
• Not sleeping is going to impact my health, leading to even worse sleep
• Now that I’m never sleeping again, my life is going to be miserable
• I’m going to ruin everyone else’s life around me because I’m non-functional

That thinking seems a little dramatic and silly now, but the world is a harsh place when you aren’t sleeping. What surprised me the most is that this didn’t just result in me sleeping at odd times of the day. It resulted in me basically not sleeping much at all.

The first night I slept about 5 hours. I probably only pulled off that many hours because I was running on fumes. To my body, the time at which we made it to our Airbnb was 2am, but in Tokyo it was 5pm. The second night things got worse. We went to bed around 8:30pm and I only slept until 12:30am, never going back to sleep that night. The third night was the same and this is where I started to get worried about where this was heading. I just didn’t see how it would get better.

Taking Action

After a few nights with little sleep, I felt like I need to take some form of action to fix this. If nothing else, I at least wanted to feel like I was gaining control of the situation.

I thought about the actual problems I was having at night that contributed to waking or staying awake. One of these was my own bad habit of listening to stuff to fall asleep. This habit started as just a tool that I would use sometimes to turn off my thoughts and fall asleep quickly. My approach was to play something really interesting at low volume. For some reason trying to focus on that caused me to fall asleep. It’s the same effect as falling asleep while watching a good movie. The problem was I started doing this every single night, not just as an occasional tool. When you do that every night you spend more and more time finding that interesting thing to listen to. On top of that you’re shining a light in your face every time you break out your phone.

The second problem I identified is that when I would wake up, I would immediately check what time it is. This seems harmless enough, but it opens up the line of thinking that it’s x o’clock and if I fall asleep right now I could get x hours of sleep. That just creates more pressure.

And the final problem I could see is that laying around doom-thinking is also not productive or helpful. I needed something non-electronic to get up and do if I was doom-thinking in bed.

The Protocol

To address those issues I decided on some basic sleep rules that I put in place which I decided were never to be violated under any circumstances. Maybe if you have good sleep habits already, these seem like basic common sense. For me these rules were a life saver that I intend to keep implemented for good.

#1

Do not listen to anything to fall asleep. This keeps you from spending time finding things to listen, from being jarred awake if any of the commercials get loud, and from having an annoying earbud in.

#2

Do not access your phone for any reason after going to bed. This prevents any possibility of the phone shining light in your face, and prevents you from doom scrolling news or whatever your time waster of choice is. If you can’t avoid the temptation, put the phone in another room along with your earbuds. This is also important for #3 below.

#3

Do not check what time it is under any circumstances. If you need to get up at a certain time, set an alarm or two alarms and don’t check the time before those go off. This rule was just as important, or possibly more important than the other two rules for me. If I wake up in the middle of the night and don’t know what time it is, it gives me hope that maybe I slept six or seven straight hours and it’s almost morning. That’s powerful because it gives me hope that even if I don’t go back to sleep, I had a pretty good night’s sleep anyway. That hope is relaxing, and lulls me back to sleep.

#4

Have something specific in mind that you can do in the middle of the night if you can’t sleep. I made a list of things written in pen in a notebook that I could do. These included lesson planning for school, writing notes about various things, etc. It’s important that whatever you choose for this activity does not violate rules #1-#3. Everything I did involved writing with a pen in a notebook with as little light as possible.

Jet Lag Procedural Add-Ons

In addition to these four rules, I did a few procedural things that I found from the mayo clinic for my travel situation. Since we effectively traveled really far east, I started wearing sunglasses in the morning until about 10am to keep my body from confusing the morning light with sunset light. I also made a point to get exercise through the day, and to get lots of afternoon sunlight.

On night six I slept about 6.5 hours, and then on night seven I slept basically a normal night. While this wasn’t fun, it was an experience in itself. The positive outcome is I have these tools I can use any time I’m in this situation, and my sleep habits have been changed for the better.