A guide to sleeping on long-haul flights

Here’s how you can get the best possible sleep on long-haul flights, and beat jet lag

Signing up to do an Ironman in Australia, a marathon in the states or going on a tour of Asia with your sports team all sound like amazing ideas on paper. After all, you get to combine a holiday with something you’re passionate about and have been training for over the last weeks, months or even years. The only potential problem? Arriving exhausted from the long-haul flight you take to get there.

Being sleep deprived is one of the worst possible states to be in when competing in any kind of physical activity, at any level. As well as the feelings of general fatigue associated with tiredness a study by the University of New South Wales found that even moderate sleep deprivation slows reaction times so much that it’s the equivalent of being tipsy.

Lose the lag

If your flight is during the day you need to make sure you stay awake so you don’t interfere with your body clock, then when you land you need to ensure you don’t go to sleep until it’s nighttime. Still, the interruption of your internal body clock (technically known as your circadian rhythm) can still affect you. This is because it’s controlled by cells in the brain that regulate your brain’s production of melatonin (the hormone that controls your sleep cycles) based on how much light or darkness you are exposed to. In short, jet lag can be a bitch.

If you can, book enough time off work so you can have at least three full days to recover after landing before your event. If you’re sleep-deprived before flying, passing through more than four timezones, or are travelling east then five days is optimum. 

Science of sleep

When flying through the night you need to try and get as much sleep as possible, especially if you’re landing at your destination in the morning. British Airways recently ran some interesting experiments where they used specially made blankets to monitor passenger’s brainwaves to visually represent how relaxed they were (the blankets were connected via Bluetooth to a brainwave sensor and woven with fibre optics that changed colour in real time, see below) and find out what people should avoid to get the most sleep possible.

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