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Jet Lag Advisor pre-departure advise reversed (making jet lag substantially worse)

jsla7527
over 2 years ago

So, I am flying from US West Coast to Europe tomorrow (+9 hour difference), and the Jet Lag Advisor tells me I need to delay my body clock. Ie. it wants me to go to bed LATER than I'd normally would for eastward travel. This makes no sense. Flying eastward (which is the worse direction), you need to advance your body clock, not delay it. It makes perfect sense to start going to bed earlier a few days before your trip, so maybe instead of Pacific Ttime you're more on East Coast time by the time your trip comes up. But later, as in moving towards Hawaii time? That's just making things worse. The advice has always been - go to bed earlier before flying east. Go to bed later before flying west. 

What is your experience with the jet lag advisor? Am I missing something here? Did the jet lag advisor decide that delaying the clock by 15 hours is easier than advancing it by 9? That's technically possible, but that would need to be clearly spelled out, because as of now, the advisor goes against any other advice I've seen, or just plain old common sense of moving closer to your destination time rather than farther away. 

+9 hours. Delay your body clock. Really? So I get to +12 hours before the trip?

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Same question, I'm really confused by this. Also I'm going on vacation, so I will tend to wake up later there (around 9am) than I do here (6am), so in a way that already reduces the jetlag by 3 hours, and I only have 6 left to go. So it makes no sense to me to try to delay my body clock by 18 hours!

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Former Member - Your question came to my attention recently and I was able to ask the jet lag adviser development team about your situation.

    Did the jet lag advisor decide that delaying the clock by 15 hours is easier than advancing it by 9? 

    As you suspected, this is exactly what happens. 

    Science agrees with what is confirmed through personal experience. It is quite a bit easier to delay your body's internal clock by staying up later than usual than to advance it by trying to go to sleep earlier than usual. Given that fact, it makes sense that the point where going east becomes going west is not 12h in either direction when it comes to your body's internal clock. Instead, research shows is that the split is more like +9 and -15 in terms of facilitating the most comfortable transition possible - not that it is ever easy. ;-)

    That's why the advice for flying from, say, Los Angeles to Stockholm (+9) is different from Los Angeles to New York (+4). It is a bit counter intuitive, but +9 seems to be the expert consensus. We'll see what we can do about updating the support content to clarify this situation.

    Thanks for your feedback. 
    HermanB

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Herman_Garmin

    To make the confusion greater - I'm travelling from Norway to Japan tomorrow - a +8h difference - and the first time I have used the Jet Lag Advisor. The advice on the watch (Epix Gen 2) talks about actions to delay my body clock while the phone app talks about advancing my body clock....something rather inconsistent and not much use as it is......

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Andrew McCann


    Any chance you took screen caps of the conflicting feedback? Those could be useful as conflicting feedback between device and app could be challenging to investigate without knowing the exact feedback you were provided.  

    Safe travels. 


  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Herman_Garmin

    Sorry I didn't manage to grab a screenshot from the watch, but from that first notification onwards it only talked about advancing your body clock. It does not seem possible to read the notification after a certain time - it just disappeared. One silly thing during adjustment after the eastward trip was being advise to wear sunglasses outside to avoid light long after sunset. The watch knows when the sunrise and sunset are so this seems a bit strange.

    I'm now about to travel westwards (-8 hrs) from Japan to Norway and have just started getting advice (2 days before travel). Again the notification on the watch disappeared before I could get a shot of it but it advised activity in the evening 'to stay awake longer to advance your body clock'. The right advice but for the wrong reason - going westwards I surely need to delay my body clock.

    In the phone app, the advice and explanation is good (delay) but as I have assimilated to local time days ago, why would the figure show that it feels like another 8 hours in advance (it says 03:09 at 19:09)? If I am adjusted it should show that it feels like local time.

    I'm sorry but I can't see how to attach a file.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Andrew McCann

    Now that I have returned home from my trip, I can share some further experience with the Jet Lag Advisor which might be useful for further development if it can be passed on.

    Generally the advice seemed sound both ways (apart from the one notification early on which seemed to contradict the rest) but there are some issues with how it is implemented - 

    • Time in Europe changed to summer time during my trip, meaning that the time difference on the way to Japan was +8hrs but only -7hrs on the way home. This fact was ignored by the Jeg Lag Advisor which insisted on the difference being -8hrs on the way home. Not a big difference, I know, but obviously a flaw in programming as the watch and app both know this. It seemed strange to be told the time at the destination incorrectly.
    • The advice screens should be scrollable forward to the next day on the phone app (Android). Scrolling to previous days is not very useful, but being able to know what advice will come after midnight is essential for planning - it should not be necessary to wait until midnight!
    • The guidance on the watch becomes difficult to use as the time line becomes obscured by a thick white line during travel (my travel was around 24 hrs long). It should be possible to see the time of day also during the travel period.

    • The middle and lower left buttons do not work for scrolling the guidance timeline even though there are arrows indicating this on the watch screen.
    • During the couple of days before the return journey, the phone app got confused and showed the 'feels like' time as +8hrs to where I was already acclimated! Once acclimated you feel like the local time and showing a time an extra +8hrs was really confusing.. This error sorted itself out during the journey home

    .

    • A smaller issue - when advising to avoid light, it seems a bit silly to advise 'wearing sunglasses if you go outside' when it is after dark, something the watch knows.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Andrew McCann

    Thanks, !

    Really appreciate this. I will pass along. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Herman_Garmin

    Is it something that is proven? I always heard that I have to wake up/ go to bed earlier before travelling east. I did some research and garmin seems to be the only one to give this advice. Did you receive positive feedback from people following the jet lag advisor for a +9 jet lag? 
    Thank you.