Fly East for Bad Jet Lag
Alaska sports teams often have difficulty winning a game against their competitors when they travel to other states, thousands of miles and several time zones away. The home-field advantage has been an accepted--and proven--cliche since Napoleon tried to invade Russia in the winter of 1812.
Alaska and other western teams might face more during away games than a hostile crowd, bad hotel food and an unfamiliarity with the quirks of a certain playing field, however. According to a study recently published in Nature, teams that travel east suffer more from jet lag than those traveling west.
Three researchers from Massachusetts decided over lunch one day to inspect major league baseball records to see how jet lag affects teams. Lawrence Recht and William Schwartz, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Robert Lew, of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, poured through three years of game results from the 19 major league teams on the east and west coasts to find a link between home-field advantage and directional jet leg.
Almost everyone who has flown over a few time zones has felt some of the symptoms of jet lag: fatigue, an inability to fall asleep, body aches, digestive problems and disorientation. All these feelings occur because human body processes are tuned to cycles called circadian rhythms. Organisms, from one-celled creatures to humans, synchronize to the earth's 24-hour rotation cycle. This cycle dictates when they sleep, wake, secrete hormones and perform other bodily functions.
Humans develop circadian rhythms even if they're isolated in a cave, according to Schwartz, a professor of neurology. Even without sunlight or clocks, people develop cycles that dictate body temperature changes, waking and sleeping. These cycles are slightly longer than 24 hours, Schwartz said.
Light and dark periods, temperature, humidity and social interactions all fine tune the human body to a 24-hour day. When these variables are mixed up--such as when one flies from Anchorage to Miami--body processes don't catch up immediately. It takes several days for most people to adjust to the environmental stimuli of a new place.
Many studies show that heading east is worse than heading west. In tests of U.S. Army soldiers who recently transferred between the U.S. and Germany, it took three days for the soldiers who flew home to the U.S. to adjust to time and environmental changes. Those transferring eastward to Germany took eight days to adapt, according to the 1983 study in the journal Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine.
The baseball researchers found the same thing--crossing time zones from west to east was worse than traveling from east to west. Baseball teams playing at home won 56 percent of all games studied, but the researchers found quite a difference if the visiting team had just traveled eastward. The home team scored 1.24 more runs each game when the visiting team had just completed west-to-east coast travel. Home games played in the west showed no statistically significant difference in runs per game.
Why is it harder to adapt to traveling east? Schwartz pointed to the fact that, devoid of stimulus, the body develops rhythms slightly longer than 24 hours. He suggests that it might be easier for the body to adapt to a longer day (such as when an airline passenger gains four hours on a trip from New York to Los Angeles), than to a shorter day when traveling eastward.
"When you fly from east to west, you're lengthening the day and going in the natural direction the (internal) clock wants to go," Schwartz said. "When you're flying from west to east, you're compressing the day."
Maybe the next time an Alaska team needs to play a team from Michigan, the coach should schedule a west-bound flight via Tokyo and London, purely for scientific purposes of course. I volunteer to go along and record the results.
