A day-by-day schedule of light exposure, sleep, caffeine and meals to help you adjust to a new time zone faster — built around your real flight dates.
The Jet Lag Recovery Planner builds a personalised, day-by-day schedule to help you adjust to a new time zone with the least possible misery. It uses the time difference between your origin and destination, the direction of travel, and your usual sleep window to recommend bedtime targets, wake times, light exposure windows, light-avoidance windows, caffeine cutoffs, and meal timing — across the days before your flight, the flight itself, and the first week at your destination.
The plan is grounded in well-established circadian science: your body clock is most strongly entrained by light, secondarily by meal timing, and only mildly by sleep schedule alone. That is why the plan emphasises when to get light and when to avoid it as much as it does sleep itself. Your inputs are saved automatically in your browser's local storage — no account, no sign-up, nothing sent to a server. Pair it with the Travel Budget Planner and Travel Packing Checklist for end-to-end trip prep.
Tip: the single most effective intervention is light timing. Even a quick 30-minute walk outside in the right window beats most over-the-counter remedies for resetting your body clock.
Your body's natural circadian period is slightly longer than 24 hours, so it drifts later by default. Travelling west ("delaying" your clock) goes with that drift; travelling east ("advancing" your clock) fights it, which takes longer to adjust.
It's a rule-of-thumb estimate: roughly 1 day per time zone going east, and around 0.5–0.75 days per zone going west. Real-world recovery depends on age, sleep flexibility, light exposure discipline, and stress. Use it as a planning baseline, not a guarantee.
Melatonin can help with eastward travel of more than five time zones when taken at the new bedtime for the first few nights. Doses of 0.5–3 mg are typically enough; more is not better. Talk to a clinician before using it, especially with other medications.
On long-haul flights, set your watch to destination time as soon as you board and behave accordingly: sleep when it's night there, stay awake when it's day. Drink water, skip alcohol, and walk the aisle every couple of hours.
Yes — even a 1–2 hour shift across two or three nights makes a measurable difference, especially for trips of 5+ time zones. The planner suggests gradual shifts so you don't ruin the days right before your trip.
A short nap (20–30 minutes) before mid-afternoon can help if you are extremely tired. Avoid long naps and never nap within six hours of your target bedtime — they will wreck the first night and slow the whole adjustment.
Yes. Your origin, destination, dates, and sleep times are stored only in your browser's local storage on this device. Nothing is uploaded to a server. Clearing your browser data will remove the saved trip.
Yes. The planner reads each city's offset on your actual travel dates, so a London → New York flight in March (when the US has switched to DST but the UK hasn't yet) shows the correct 4-hour shift instead of the usual 5.