How to Beat Jet Lag (Backed by Science) | Andrew Herr

Today's special guest is Andrew Hare. I've had him on a number of times, one of the very few guests who we've re-invited to the show. Andrew was my personal health coach and advisor for a long time. He's worked for the US Defense Force and specifically designed protocols for the Navy SEALs. Today, we're gonna talk about how to travel with zero jet lag, and I mean zero. I've tried it to South Africa, UK, et cetera. He has got this incredible product that will guarantee you no jet lag. So, Have fun. Enjoy the show. Andrew, a huge welcome to the Habits of High Performers podcast. How are you doing?

I'm doing well, James. So good to be here. It's so good to reconnect.

Oh, I'm so glad. And I think I told you this last time you were on the show, but that very few people get re-invited. I think the only person that's been on multiple times is the former prime minister. You've now beaten the former prime minister. This is your third or fourth episode with us.

Well, I feel honored, and it's a joy every time I come on the show. So every time you invite me back, I'll be here.

Ah, thank you. I'm super excited to have you because I've learned so much from you. You were my personal health advisor for a while. You helped me through some really significant challenges. I still call you a friend and an advisor who can help me in many parts of my life. But today, we're going to look at something very specific. Last year, I had 100 flights, a little bit ridiculous. I travel often. I like it, but also, I know that it takes its toll on my body. So, we're going to talk to that a little bit, but also to the person who maybe travels frequently, maybe not as much as 100, but frequently. And it could be short haul, an hour, 2 hours, or it could be long haul. I wanted to talk about the stress of travel on my body. The reason I want to have that chat is you helped me many years ago with a product called Fly Kit. And essentially, I was flying to South Africa, short trip, coming back, and jet lag was my biggest concern because I was on a stage speaking like 16 hours after I got back home. And so, I took this very specific protocol, had fun doing it, and I was like, "Ah, we'll see." I was a bit Irish skeptic. So, I tried it on the way there. I was like, "Oh, no jet lag. Oh, it's just because I'm excited to be in South Africa." Okay. On the way home, did it again. I was like, "Oh my goodness, zero jet lag." So, it was transformational. So, thank you for that. But, could we start chatting a little bit about what travel does? Why you brought Flykit to the world, et cetera?

So, the story, as many do, goes back to Navy SEALs. So, I was working with Navy SEALs on dive mission performance. And in that, I learned that pressure changes in the right setting cause inflammation in the body. So now, fast forward and I'm working with another executive I was coaching, David, and he says, "Hey, Andrew, I'm flying to Asia to close business deals from the East Coast of the United States. We land at 4:00 PM. There's a big business dinner that night and they want to negotiate at 7:00 AM the next morning. They're using jet lag as a negotiating tool. It's killing us. There might have been a curse word in there. I don't remember exactly. What should I do? I was like, great, get your protocol. When are you leaving? So Tuesday, it was Sunday. I said, great, I'll get you something tomorrow. And so I sat down and I took, you know, at that point, a decade of health and performance work, much of it with the military, my background in immunology and health physics and other areas. And, in one of those moments you get in life, I just sat down and I kind of put it all together all at once. This wasn't like a 6-month thing. I put that protocol together that day, pulled in a bunch of research, pulled in all the stuff on circadian rhythms, but also pulled in the impact that flying has on your body and gave him a hand there, typed out a Microsoft Word plan, do this at this time, do this at this time with a box of some bottles of supplements and some very ugly blue light blocking glasses, like literally industrial ones. And I went back on my week, but it's like, you know, Wednesday or Thursday, I guess Thursday probably. And I get an email from Seoul and it's David saying, "Andrew, I just slept 8 hours my first night. What did you do?" And I'm like a skeptical scientific kind of guy myself. And so, I was like, "Okay. Well, that's cool, but let's see what happens for some other people." And so, friends were traveling or clients were traveling and I gave them this protocol and just kept working. And now, Tens of thousands of people have used Flykit at this point and we run more than 90% of people can go to Europe, Asia, Australia, down to you guys, and really anywhere in the world with minimal, no jet lag. And, the sort of key of it is not that the circadian rhythm piece doesn't matter, it's huge, but that when you fly in a plane, you go to altitude, it's like climbing an 8,000-foot mountain in 15 minutes, which gives you just a taste of this altitude sickness, decompression sickness. It's called the— there's 26% less oxygen at altitude in a plane. And so, they call it hypobaric hypoxia, lower pressure, lower oxygen. And that causes oxidative stress, can lead to inflammation in the body. And it turns out that the interaction of not enough sleep and this oxidative stress can together cause inflammation in the body. And that makes it nearly impossible to reset your circadian rhythm quickly. Basically, what we did is we figured out how to block that effect, keep the inflammation down from not enough sleep because if you're flying to anywhere in the world with long enough distance for jet lag, it also means you can't sleep a full night. So, if you go from the U.S. to Asia, let's say, and you sleep 8 hours, you're going to wake up at like 5:00 PM Tokyo time and you are not going to bed that night. So, you actually have to get too little sleep, which by the way is also an inflammatory event, and do all this shift. So, basically what we figured is if you put all the tools together, block the inflammation, support the immune system, support the brain and body, give you energy in the right ways, not just like 12 cups of coffee, that you can actually eliminate jet lag. And so, that's the kind of broader sweep of it. And then, there's all the other things around travel about that can affect your body like Why do many very high-performing people sleep worse in hotel rooms? Eating on the road is usually different. How does drinking affect you in the airport, on the plane, after you've arrived? All these different things together. And so I'll stop there. It's an area I'm very interested in and care a lot about, so I could just keep rambling on.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Caroline@jjloughlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes. Good. I am too. And I know there's a listener going right now, okay, I need to know more about this, this, this, this. So let's, if we go short haul for a second, 'cause that's maybe more complex 'cause it's obviously you're not getting jet lag in terms of time zones. But let's say in a typical month I do say 20 to 30 short haul flights. So that's, 20 to 40 hours roughly of air travel a month. What's happening to my body every time I go up just for an hour or two in the air and back down?

So, I mentioned that hypobaric hypoxia, that pressure drop with the lower oxygen you're breathing. And it depends on the type of plane. For any short hop flight, you're going to be pressurized to about 8,000 feet relative altitude. But for long haul, if you're on a 787 or an A350, you're pressurized to about 5,000 feet relative. Which is why those planes are better to fly. And, there's another reason I can get to later about why you want to fly a 787 long-haul if you can. But, you're getting that initial rapid decompression which is causing that oxidative stress and some of that inflammation. And then, you're getting that continued effects of that low oxygen, low pressure. So, you're going to get some of that effect, but of course, it's not as hard on your body as 8, 10, 14 hours of flying. And so, what do people experience on shorter flights? Maybe your gut's off more after you fly. Maybe you get less than on a long flight but some swelling in your ankles or legs. And maybe you just have a lower energy afterwards, brain fog. And this is all secondary to these immune effects of these pressure changes and low oxygen on flights.

Yeah. I feel other things like dry skin. I get much drier eyes around my eyes. Definitely get gut challenges and just the ability to focus. I feel a little bit, not drowsy, but just a little bit vague in my ability to focus.

And so, what's really interesting is that the immune system and the brain can talk really actively, I guess is a good way to put it. So, immune cells can transpose into the brain and cytokines, which are signaling molecules released by immune cells, can also cross the blood-brain barrier. So, you can actually have quite a bit of crosstalk there. And so, when we have inflammation in general, there's a study that I don't know how they recruited people to be in, but here we are. They injected the parts of the cell wall of bacteria that freak out your immune system. So, there were no live bacteria, but just the cell wall parts. And these fragments called lipopolysaccharides cause a strong immune response, strong inflammatory response. And within 1 to 2 hours of injecting that into people, they had a spike in anxiety, lower confidence levels. And so, the immune system can really affect our body and it's maybe not surprising. We're always making up a story a little bit when we do evolutionary psychology, but if you're sick, you probably want somebody away from other people. And then also, you don't want the body to expend a lot of energy because you may need that energy to fight the virus or bacteria. And so, you're experiencing lower energy, which can absolutely be downstream. And then, hypoxia can really affect the gut. There's quite a bit of research on, for example, potentially increased hypoxia levels in people with inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disease of the gut. And so, we know that this hypoxia can affect the gut directly and also the gut microbiome. And so, all those things you're mentioning can be secondary to these effects of lower oxygen and inflammation in the body.

Okay, this is so, so valuable. I'm going through a thing right now with my gut and so forth and trying to figure out what's leading it or what's causing it. So, with prevention before we fly, and then of course when we're flying, what can we use to reduce these challenges, particularly on the gut and inflammation in general?

Yeah, so, you know, what we've found is that You can do first actual antioxidants. So vitamin C, for example, will help, but you gotta use it in the right window before you fly. The second thing is I'm a big fan, you've heard me talk before about polyphenols. These are a class of compounds that actually people refer to as antioxidants in fruits and vegetables, but that's actually not how they work. In fact, it's impossible that they work that way if they improve your health and they can. What they do is they actually signal through activating genetic switches for your cell to produce more protective enzymes and more protective compounds. So, they actually turn up the protective systems so that now you're providing external compounds like antioxidants like vitamin C that can soak up some free radicals and you're having the cell turn up its defense so that it's not harmed as much. And then, we use in the Flykit product, we're using omega-3 fatty acids at a specific kind of sequence and highly concentrated doses because that provides anti-inflammatory precursors to the body. So, that's kind of a general approach to protecting the body. And then, if we go to the gut, there I think we can do a few different things and then I'm going to talk about non-supplement approaches. But, for the gut, things that can be helpful Certainly something like curcumin, which is another polyphenol, but one that isn't absorbed super well. So then how is it helpful? Well, if it's not absorbed super well, it may be helpful locally directly in the gut. And so I like curcumin and magnesium of the right type. I like magnesium citrate for the gut when traveling. But what else can you do besides supplements? Well, you basically— there are other ways you can turn up your body's natural protective systems. This is a process called hormesis. So, when you stress the system and then it gets sort of stronger, recovers better, that's called hormesis. So, the classic hormetic stressor is exercise. You do some bicep curls, you damage and put a stress signal on your biceps and they get bigger and stronger if you don't do too much and tear them or injure them. So, that's a hormetic stressor. Sauna, you put heat stress on the body and then it improves afterwards. Exercise, sauna, potentially cold plunge. So, I like— obviously, you're not going to work out and get all sweaty right before you get on the plane, but even if it's in a few-hour window before, exercise and sauna are two things I mentioned that are also interesting stressors that then could prepare your body to be ready for being on a plane.

And, what about a hot shower? If you can't get access to a sauna prior, would a hot shower help?

Probably not, not enough. I mean, I love a hot shower. It's one of my favorite things in the world, but it's not hot enough to call— unless you're maybe a hot bath, it was really hot and you stay in long enough to where you're really feeling the heat. But again, you need to stress the body and a hot shower generally isn't hot enough to stress the body and really raise that core body temperature.

Okay, that makes sense. Now, polyphenols, if we rewind to that, so I'm thinking things like blueberries, Is there anything— is that— okay. So, what else can we eat?

Yeah. So, tart cherry, blueberries, basically, the things that are highest in these compounds are fruits that are dark-colored and you eat the skin. So, you nailed it with blueberries, the red ones, raspberries, strawberries, things like that are very high in polyphenols and specifically these anthocyanin compounds. That are actually red or blue. And then vegetables also can be very high in them. And so, I think eating, and this gets to eating well because these are all things that can help, but they're actually things that can make you more susceptible to inflammation. So, eating pro-inflammatory things before you get on a plane, tons of salt, fried food, tons of sugar or carbs that are going to mess with your blood sugar, all those things are kind of the opposite. And can sort of prime your body for inflammation, which is the opposite of obviously what we want to do.

Yeah. And specific question around, say, berries. So, most mornings I have frozen blueberries and frozen raspberries on my oatmeal. Is there any issues with freezing and then eating? Does that reduce anything?

It should actually do the opposite. It should actually preserve them quite well, especially if they're frozen sort of like off the plant, as you will. Yeah, I think there should be no reason it should damage the compounds or, you know, not, not to a large degree. So I think frozen is totally fine and in some places and sometimes might even be preferable.

Awesome. So for us, we'll go to the long haul in a second, but for the short haul traveler, what would Flykit look like for them in terms of using it as a protocol?

Yeah, we have what we call a Flykit Domestic. You know, most of, you know, most of Flykit's going on in the US. So for your, you know, for us, we call domestic, you know, anything between LA and New York. In Miami. So, what it is is we've sort of packaged up the, what we think are some of the optimal supplements to use. And then, the nice thing is we have an app that customizes your plan for when you do everything. And in that kit, you're going to get not only supplements to manage the inflammation, but we're also going to give you some things to help sleep that first night. And for energy, either if you need to stay up a little later because Flight Kit Domestic is meant for up to 3 hours of time change and up to 6 hours of flying. So if you do, you know, for you, you may not have— you may have an hour flight and there's no time change. But even if you do have some, you know, somewhat of a time change, we can manage that without needing the sort of full Flight Kit International protocol. But what it is, is 4 different supplements that the app will then give you a custom plan. You put in your sleep schedule, your sleep schedule at, you know, where you're going. And by the way, you might have no time change, but maybe at home you go to bed at, you wake up at 7:00 AM and you need to wake up at 5:00 AM for a speaking gig or something. So you actually have the equivalent of a 2-hour time change. And so the app will take that into account and then take your flights in automatically, and then it will give you a custom plan based on also some questions about your body. For when to use the different supplements in there. And it's sort of good for a round trip as well.

Yeah, the app was amazing. I remember using the app for one of my recent long hauls and it just, hour by hour says, you know, do this, sleep here, take this. It was amazing. And the one thing I did appreciate, it was like, what are you doing when you land? What time will you be getting to bed at? What time do you usually get to bed at? It took care of all the calculations, mathematics that I just wouldn't have had the patience to do. So thank you for that.

Yeah, I mean, look, you're busy and when you're traveling, you're usually extra busy. Trying to run a business while like, you know, going through airport security and all these things. Um, so yeah, that— and so it just, you know, the nice thing is just it does everything for you and it gives you notifications whenever you need to do anything. You're kind of just good to go.

Yeah, it's incredible. So for a listener in this part of the world here, um, flights to Australia, there's always a minimum 2-hour time difference. It could be even further with Perth. It could be, I think, 4 or 5-hour time difference. So the domestic would be the perfect kit for that. But then, anything going up to North America, we're talking 12 to 16 hours. Europe, like 30 hours in terms of the stopoffs. So, talk me through a long haul, what that might look like and what the protocol actually exists.

Yeah. So, for Flykit International, we want to be more intensive because when you're going to be— your body's going to be exposed to these flight conditions for longer. And two, you're typically having a larger time change, although not always. We do have people flying from the U.S. to the very southern part of South America where there's a de minimis time change but still has a massive effect on your body. And so, people love it for that trip as well. But, what are we doing? So, we're using those same 4 supplements and then we're adding what we call Circadian Reset. So, this is a drink mix that you add to coffee, which we provide at the right time. And it's a little bit counterintuitive. I told you that too much sugar is going to cause inflammation in your body. So why are we giving you a drink mix that has methylated B vitamins and sugar in it? And the answer is because your brain is not the only thing running a circadian rhythm in your body. Turns out your gut and your liver and your hormones, all these things run on circadian rhythms. In fact, every cell has a circadian clock in your body. And, one of the most effective tools to reset some of these is insulin. And insulin is a natural hormone that we release in response to eating carbohydrates. So, what we do is we give you a very— it's 13.5 grams of sugar, so it's not a huge amount. We're not sort of crushing you. It's less than a soda would have, but you're going to have this. It'll give you a little blip of insulin at the right time that's going to give your body a little bit of that reset of your circadian rhythm peripherally along with the methylated B vitamins, which help you also make— they make your eyes more sensitive or the receptors more sensitive to the circadian effects of light. And then, we're giving you a little bit of caffeine at that time, which also has a circadian effect. And then, 1 hour later, we're going to have you eat, which is going to blunt any blood sugar effects and give you these anti-inflammatory antioxidant compounds to manage any of the effects from the sugar. So, we're going to add that. And then, we're also going to add blue light-blocking glasses. So, it turns out that our eyes have receptors that are non-visual, meaning they don't help you see anything but they're still detecting light and they're primarily detecting blue light. And then, they're hardwired into the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the SCN. This is the part of your brain that runs your circadian rhythm. And basically what they are is your body, your brain needs a way to sync to the natural sunlight rhythms. And so, it's a really elegant solution that it uses blue light. Why? Well, if it used red light, then that fire we would sit around thousands of years ago at night would potentially mess with your circadian rhythm, but it doesn't. The only blue light that really existed about 1,000 years ago was the sun. Now, there's stars and things like that, but they're not bright enough to have an effect. So, there was just no other blue light around. And so, what that meant was that the sun then could keep you entrained, technical term, keep your circadian rhythm locked. And so, you cannot operate in modern life today without blue light around. The light bulbs that look white or even kind of yellow have a ton of blue light in them. Your phone screen has a ton of blue light. White light is white because it has every color from red to blue but also a lot of blue. So anyways, all that to say there's tons of blue light around at a very high intensity relative to what affects our circadian rhythm. And the simple solution to that is you put on a pair of glasses, that block blue light and suddenly we can abolish that effect on the circadian rhythm. And, if you wear those at the right time, there are multiple times during the day when our circadian sensors are sort of on high alert. One has to do with where you came from and what time your sleep cycle was at home. And then, pre-bed, we want to just give your body the ability to calm down and And so, it really helps people calm and sleep as well as manage circadian effects.

Yeah, I imagine even for someone who's not traveling, putting on blue light-blocking glasses an hour before bed whilst they're watching Netflix is probably not a bad idea.

It can be profoundly effective. In fact, people's sensitivity varies, but I once found a person who was having this issue that they were waking up too early in the morning. They wanted to sleep longer. And what I try— helped them track it down to was they were so sensitive to the effects of blue light that by wearing it for 90 minutes before bed, they were waking up earlier. So, all they had to do was only wear it 30 minutes before bed and then they woke up— they went to bed exactly when they wanted, woke up exactly when they wanted. But, almost everyone does sleep better. And, it's not only falling asleep, there are plenty of studies showing improved sleep quality as well. One thing, some people have blue light glasses that come from the doctor and those lenses, they'll say they're blue light blocking but they're clear. What those lenses are doing is potentially either not blocking very much blue light because they're not clear if they are or they're blocking a very specific wavelength gap where the blue comes out of LEDs and the computer monitor, All that to say, it doesn't do the trick. You need lenses that are this color. You can see they're quite orange.

Yes.

You need lenses that are that color to really have the effect you want. So, if you're buying blue light-blocking glasses and they're clear, they're not going to do the trick for sleep. And so, you're looking for ones that have those orange lenses and you get the added bonus of looking super cool going into your hotel room at night. But, but you can just sleep well and feel so much better.

Yeah, no, 100%. And interesting, even for the short-hauls and definitely for the long-hauls, I wear compression socks. Is that smart even for the short-hauls? Is it helpful?

Yeah. So, what's going on there is these same inflammatory and oxidative stress conditions are causing your blood vessels to leak fluid. And so, that's why people get swelling in their legs. And compression socks, literally put higher pressure so then the return— basically, it's just pushing, squeezing that fluid back up into the system. And, while short flights have a much lower incidence of, let's say, deep vein thrombosis, these blood clots people can get, certainly it's not comfortable to have that extra swelling in your legs. And, if you're going to exercise the next day, it just doesn't feel as good. So, yeah, I think it's absolutely like no harm, only benefit probably to wear those when you fly.

And DVT that you mentioned a moment ago, my understanding is once you get to 40, you know, your susceptibility increases, and then every 10 years from there on, it just— your chances of getting it are higher. Is there anything else we can be doing to prevent?

Yeah, so, um, and again, people have more susceptible— pardon me, susceptibility to inflammation as we get older, and so that's part of why, and blood clotting is an inflammatory process. There's a couple things. One, if you ever get a genetic test, and that's a whole nother discussion we could have about when they're useful and when they're not, but if you have Factor V Leiden, this is a genetic mutation where you're more susceptible to blood clotting, you should absolutely take much higher precautions because you are much more sensitive to this type of blood clot when flying. So, one, if you happen to know your Factor V Leiden, um, you should absolutely be aware of that. And then two, um, the compression socks help. This is now a medical condition, so I'm not allowed to say by the FDA that the supplements we give you will help that. But from a mechanistic standpoint, I believe that the supplements that we talked about should influence the immune system in a way that helps that. But without data, I'm not legally allowed to make any claims around that, but I'm just telling you my general scientific opinion about that is that what we're doing should help. And then, the third is there's also another device for people who like it. It's called a Firefly. It looks like a giant Band-Aid in that it has two sticky strips and then something in the middle. But the something in the middle is an electronic nerve stimulator. So, you basically put it around the outside of your knee just below the kneecap and it sends a little electrical impulse into the nerve there and it causes your foot to tap. And that tapping of the foot causes your calf to act like a pump and the muscles down there to act like a pump. So, you actually are literally pumping the fluid out. It was actually based on a technology developed to help people who'd had knee replacement surgery who you could obviously below the knee then you can get a lot of swelling and people really like that as well. And so, we also sell those as well. They can be helpful. So yeah, I think these are things and then getting up and moving when you can is always going to be helpful as well just to get things moving, moving your ankle, moving up and down, walking up and down the plane, anything you can do to feel comfortable to move. And then obviously if you're horizontal and you have the resources to fly in the front of the plane, that's also going to help just because you're going to get less pooling.

Yeah, of course. And so I'm imagining hydration is going to be key. It's just common sense. Keep water up. Yeah.

Food.

You mentioned food. So even at the front of the plane, my take on it is that most food on an airplane is garbage and it's high salt, it's high preservatives. You could tell me I'm wrong. I'm happy to be told that. Or the things we can do to bring good food on with us.

Yeah, the salt thing is really interesting. It's not only for preservation, it's also because we don't taste as well at altitude. And so if you wanna make food taste good and not taste undersalted, they're gonna add more salt, but then the effects on the body are not great of that. Exactly the point. So I think eating less salt, eating less carbs, and eating less volume is probably a good idea. That gets us to dessert, which is sugar, tends to be sugar, like quite heavy, probably not ideal. And then alcohol. You know, people are always like, "But I paid for this. I want the free drink." I agree, but you also paid. Let's say you're going on a leisure trip, It could easily be with a hotel and activities and food, that could be $1,000 a day. So, what is the cost of ruining a day of that trip? And obviously, if it's business, what is the cost of not performing well? If something's important enough to travel for it, then the cost of not performing well at it is probably high. And so, that's where we also recommend people— I recommend you don't drink alcohol until after your first full night of sleep at your destination. And then, your body's in better shape. Ideally, you've done the Flykit Protocol, you've managed the system, you've gotten your first full night of sleep, your body is much more resilient then. But before then, alcohol does a couple of things. One, it can irritate your gut and really exacerbate the gut issues because alcohol is a bit of a solvent basically. Two, it ramps up your sympathetic nervous system, which then messes with your sleep quality. Your sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight system. So, if you have a whoop or an Oura or you even just notice that your heart beats faster after you're drinking, it's because it activates your sympathetic nervous system. Usually warmer, maybe even sweaty at night if you drink a lot. Again, these same effects. And so, we don't want to be higher stressed and sleeping poorly when we travel. That's going to, especially if it's long distance, that's going to really increase our probability of jet lag. And also, just, you know, if you don't sleep well, you don't perform as well the next day. And the first sort of negative effect of not sleeping enough is inflammation. So really, in so many ways, all this really does come back to inflammation.

Yeah. And food-wise, what can we bring with us? I mean, it should be high protein, high nutrient.

Yeah. So if you're eating in the airport, and then we'll go to what you can bring on a plane, if you're eating in an airport, like, salad with some protein is really an optimal option. Again, just staying away from fried, sugar, tons of salt, stuff like that is really helpful. Bring on the plane nuts if you like them. You know, any kind of like cut-up veggies or anything like that isn't that hard to put in a Ziploc bag. You know, if you like Greek yogurt, you can usually get that in the airport or even just bring with you. It's going to be okay at temperature for a little while. So things like that are all fine. And, you know, as I've experimented with these things, you cannot bring water through airport security, but you can bring food and you can bring a whole entrée in a glass Tupperware and they will literally like nobody, nobody bats an eye. And so I will, depending on the time and depending on how busy I am ahead of time, obviously you're often, you know, we're often busy before we fly, I'll just bring dinner with me and it'll be healthy stuff and I'll be happy about it. So yeah, I mean, I think those are some options. You know, if you like hard-boiled eggs, they make some that like come in little individual packs. If you're not so sensitive to dairy, some cheese kind of things can work well. So all those kinds of things I think are good options. You know, those little individual hummus or guacamole with something to dip in it. Again, these are like just reasonable options that are easy to bring. You know, it's got to be easy or else people won't do it. And then if you are going to be eating the food on the plane, you know, maybe you just eat half of it. Maybe you eat the like salad and the nuts they bring before dinner sometimes and, you know, this or that. But you leave off, you know, half, half the entrée or something. And depending what the entrée is, might not be such an issue.

Yeah, just being disciplined, yeah, and focused.

And drinking plenty of water, as you said, is like, it really helps counteract the salt intake as well. And so, that is quite helpful.

With some of our listeners, I know that we've got a lot of Air New Zealand staff that listen, got some Qantas staff, we've also got some pilots that follow the show. So, for them, I want them to look into Flykit. And yes, the link will be down below. Because imagine if your customers, if you were an airline, if your customers had access to a Flykit, and if they were business customers, maybe it got shipped to them a week prior, maybe if they're not, they can get it, pick it up at the airport, and it would just be phenomenal. So for a pilot or for a crew who are flying often, is a Flykit something that they could be doing as well?

So the trick with pilots is obviously you can imagine our algorithms are designed to sleep on the plane. Yeah. And so that's a little bit tricky. But when we have pilots reach out, I will occasionally do a custom plan for pilots if they reach out to us and we kind of like walk them through how to design it against the flight for themselves. So that can be helpful and we'll do that for pilots. We don't have an aircrew version of the Flykit app yet. You know, we're doing little pilots here and there. We're doing a little collaboration with Delta Airlines right now. On— they do this beautiful trip where they take veterans back to Normandy for World War II. And this will be the last year of the trip because you can imagine if you fought in World War II, you're now in your hundreds. But they're taking a bunch of these veterans back. And so we're providing support to the crew and staff who are doing that. And so, you know, we, we look forward to expanding this to the airlines in the near future because it is— it's really an opportunity to give the best customer experience possible.

Yeah, well, it is an amazing product. I was just, say, skeptical when I started it, like, how can this work? How can I not get jet lag? But it was brilliant, phenomenal, and really quite fun. It was kind of like a game I was playing. You kind of gamified it for me with the app. And the kit that it comes in is just awesome. It looks good, it's simple to use, it's reliable. And I was able to use it both ways, to the UK and back, South Africa and back. I haven't tried it what they call trans-Tasman, which is New Zealand to Australia, but I'll try that next month and see how it works just for that more domestic flight.

Yeah, we got to get you out some of those, some of the new to flight kit domestic. That's the newer product and it's perfect for that, you know, Auckland to Sydney kind of flight.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'll give it a crack and I'll document the journey.

Amazing.

Yeah, it'd be awesome. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for connecting. Thank you for helping me understand a lot more about what happens to my body. At altitude and how much I can actually control. And it sounds like there's way more that I can control than I thought. And I think this will really help not just myself, but every listener here that flies. And let's face it, we all fly at some point. And for those that are flying for leisure, and it's your one holiday for the year, why would you want to be jet lagged? You want to get there and you want to check out the Colosseum or get up the Eiffel Tower. You don't want to be hungover and feeling like crap for 4 days acclimatizing. You want to get there and make the most of it. So, appreciate what you've done with this product, Andrew. It's truly incredible.

Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And so then the question is, what else can we do in travel beyond just the flight and jet lag? And one thing I really like to think about is like, what can you do in your hotel room? So a few things. One, I'm not a big fan of the cleaning products they use in most hotels, like tons of fragrance and other things. So if you can, I'll always write ahead and ask if they're clean with unscented cleaning products, which some hotels will do, some won't. And then second, I will ask them if they'll put an air purifier in the room, which can be really nice because if they're cleaning, you know, there's some things they use to clean carpet that are like powder form and other things, and you just like do not want to breathe that stuff in. Okay, so that's piece one. Piece two is hotel rooms actually give an option often to sleep in a really dark room, which is great for sleep. But, there's often this problem where between the curtains, there's this bright shining bar of light that hits you right in the face. But, if there are in the closet those hangers with the clips on the bottom, you just take those clips and you clip the curtain together with those and no light will get through that barrier anymore.

Genius.

And then I think the most interesting one is I find working with many entrepreneurs that a number of them do not— will tell me, "I don't sleep as well when I'm in a hotel room." Okay, so we like talk about it. I'm like, "How about when you're with your family on vacation?" They're like, "I sleep okay then, actually." So what's going on? You know, look, many people when sleeping in a new environment, they're brain just goes on a little bit higher alert because it's a new environment. Is there risk here? There's not cognitively. We know we're safe. You're in a Ritz-Carlton, sir. You're safe. You're okay. But it is a new environment, which is a place that evolutionarily would be actually quite dangerous to go to sleep in. And so, one of the things I think can be really helpful if this is for one of your listeners, if they have this experience, is try some breathwork before you go to sleep. And so, what does that look like? You could try, for example, 4-7-8 breathing. So, try 5, maybe 10 minutes of breathing in for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, out slowly for 8 seconds. In 4, hold 7, out slowly for 8. And what that does is When we're exhaling, it's a more parasympathetic. This is more of a relaxed rest and digest calming nervous system activity. And breathing in is more sympathetic, which is your fight or flight. And so, if we change that ratio where you're breathing out a lot more than you're breathing in, it's a signal of safety to your nervous system. And that can actually be really quite helpful for people. There are different breathwork strategies, one called box breathing. There's There's different things and you can experiment with different ones. You can find all kinds of stuff online, but I would recommend trying breathwork if that's you that you have a little bit more challenge sleeping when you're alone in a hotel room, which is quite common. And, by the way, some of the most successful put-together entrepreneurs have this, so it's not something to be embarrassed about. But yeah, something that can be really helpful I think also is just that effect. In general. And then, one of my favorite sleep recommendations whether you're home or away, take a shower before bed. Turns out that our bodies use a drop in body temperature as a signal to go to sleep. And so, one of the ways to get an artificial but rapid drop in body temperature is to warm up in a shower, then you get out and your body cools off very rapidly. And then, if you get into a cold bed, which is great because you're going to then cool your body even more, if your body is now cold and you haven't taken a shower, your body thinks, "I can't fall asleep until I can show I'm going to be warm enough in this environment." Because again, if you go to sleep and it's 30 degrees outside and you're under a tree, you're going to die or get really hypothermic. So, your body has these built-in defenses But if your body's warm when you get into that bed, you're going to warm up the bed and you can fall asleep very quickly. And then, it's better to sleep usually in a cold room, so then the cold room will cool you off. And also, by the way, if you have any allergies, it washes off allergens, things like that. Plus, I don't know about you, but I find a warm shower quite relaxing.

Hell yeah.

So, that's another just of my general rules for sleep optimization, but can be really nice. And also, if you're not doing 100 things in your home but you're in a hotel room and you have a little more flexibility, then maybe that's a little easier to do.

That's still helpful. Last year, I don't know how many hotel stays I had. I don't know, it could be 80 to 120. I don't know, I lost count. Wow. And yeah, I often find that the first night is terrible. So, I've got a multi-night stay, by night 2, it's a bit better, night 3, great. But often, I've just got one-night stays, I'm in and out. And, I just can't get good sleep. So, I'm going to try some of those. I'm really familiar with breathwork, but I haven't actually done it consistently 4, 7, 8 at a hotel. I'm going to do that. The air purifier is a breakthrough. So, I stay at this one hotel up in Auckland a lot, and I might ask them if I could get an air purifier. That'd be brilliant.

Yeah. All tips I like, and these are things I'm doing when I travel, and I think it's always a good, really a good option. And, the worst thing that happens is they say no. So, I'm a big fan of using these tools to help ourselves but not having them control us, which is to say like they don't have an air purifier. The last hotel I stayed at, it was a nice hotel, it was a Four Seasons, they put a humidifier when I asked for an air purifier. And I was like, "Okay, this is kind of funny. I'm going to laugh at this and I don't need a humidifier, but—" we can laugh at these things and not have it control us, but why not ask if it's an option? Yeah, 100%.

Don't ask, don't get. And I just want to say to everyone listening or watching, go to the show notes right now and go check out Flykit. And if you are traveling, please give it a try. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. I've had tons of clients try Flykit over the years with incredible results, both smaller domestic flights through to Australia and beyond. So yeah, thank you so much, Andrew. I deeply appreciate it. And I'd like to get you back on the show after I do the domestic one to Australia, let you know how that goes.

I'm here anytime, James.

Always a pleasure. Absolutely amazing stuff. And folks, just look out for Flykit. I think it's going to be a product you're going to see everywhere very soon. But why not be an early adopter in your neck of the woods? Certainly, I've enjoyed it the last few years, but get amongst it, give it a try, and the data will speak for itself. You will have your jet lag gone.

It does. And by the way, it is rare that it does not work for people. But if it doesn't, we just give you your money back. So, I'm not here to run a company that's taking advantage of people. Obviously, goal of FlightKit is to help people. So, we just have a very firm money-back guarantee.

And I bring very few people on here with products and promote them. Unless I've used them and love them. And I'm not getting any royalties, kickbacks, commissions for this. It's truly a great product. He speaks the truth.

He speaks the truth.

Thank you so much, Andrew. Wonderful to see you again. Until next time. Thanks, James. Cheers. Thanks so much. See you later.