How To Travel Jet Lag Free – The “SLOW” and the “FAST” Systems

To apply my “Jet lag free travel” strategy, understand that we humans have two energy systems. One system is slow in nature. The other is fast.  The fast system handles new impressions, quick and unpredictable twists and turns and the instant responses you are required to produce. In your house you have the patterns of your life, which include how you get up in the morning and basically all the things you do every day. These repetitive activities create patterns that provide continuity, stability and settlement. So you have two systems. The “Slow System” maintains stable patterns and keeps the long view. The “Fast System” is reactive and is at the ready to counter and respond quickly to threats and opportunities. Think of SLOW like a pool of water. Think of the FAST like a bolt of lightening. The lightening jumps quickly. The pool of water needs to be maintained, regulated and cleaned. High intensity living that swiftly moves from one lightening strike to the next can lead to over exhaustion and can cause you to become brittle.  In a healthy scenario the FAST and SLOW system balance and help each other.   The SLOW system needs the anchor of your physical location. The FAST can travel with ease. When you leave your house on a long trip across multiple time zones the intricate balance of the SLOW and FAST systems gets ruptured. That is what you experience as jet lag.

Each of the two energy systems has an anchor in your body. The FAST likes to work through your mind. It’s the central terminal of incoming and outgoing impressions, where the FAST system is at the ready.  The anchor of the SLOW is the digestive system. Its process, phases and cycles are vital for the well-being of your SLOW energy system.

Jet lag is a phenomenon where the two systems, the “FAST” and “SLOW” go out of synch. For example, when I travel from Seattle to Israel, a 23 hour door to door trip through 10 time zones, by the time I arrive there my Fast System is in Israel but my Slow System has not yet been able to get in synch with the day/night patterns of the new location.

How do I fast-forward the synchronization of the two systems? If I can do that, if I can accelerate the synchronization of the SLOW and the FAST systems, I will be jet lag free. That’s what my Jet lag free methodology does and what the jet lag free wisdom is about in a nutshell. It’s based on separating or rather treating separately the FAST and the SLOW systems to allow a better synchronization at the place of destination.

Okay, so what does it mean and how can you do it? I’ll go into it on the next post in this series.

© Aviv Shahar