Why Bryan Johnson Now Argues for a Travel Budget, Not Just a Jet Lag Protocol

Bryan JohnsonJuly 18, 2025 · ▶ 58:33 · 24 min read

Overview

Bryan Johnson and Kate Tolo had just returned from 11 days in Europe when this episode was recorded. Kate was too sick to join, so Johnson and Dr. Mike Mallin, the physician who leads his care, recorded as a pair. The episode was meant to be a practical guide to beating jet lag. It ended up somewhere else. Both hosts concluded that the interventions help only at the margins, and that the more important question is how much crossing of time zones a person should accept in the first place.

24 min read

The 11-Day Experiment

Johnson describes the trip as a deliberate experiment in "going really hard." He and Kate stayed up later than usual and slept less than usual for the whole 11 days. He took some naps, which come up later. By his account, they declined almost every day. He says it felt like losing "three or four IQ points" daily. Their thinking became foggier, they got grumpier, and they started craving bad food. "We both saw where it was going," he says.

Mallin asked why they would do this. Johnson explained that they rarely travel internationally. A two-week trip to India and China the previous year had been "fantastic," and being out meeting people matters to the "Don't Die" mission. The travel was worth it for what they are trying to achieve, but it came at "this massive cost."

He added that he hadn't really felt jet lag since starting Blueprint. He remembers it from earlier in his life, but back then he wasn't closely tracking how he felt. On this trip he was hyper-aware of his own states, and he says that taught him valuable lessons about what international travel combined with poor sleep does to the body.

The Founders Who "Grin and Bear It"

The day before recording, Johnson had attended a conference of about 150 founders running very fast-growing companies. He says the group simply took it for granted that people in their position fly internationally all the time, switch time zones constantly, and "grin and bear it" as part of the job.

The point he tried to make to them was about accounting. A founder sees clearly which actions make the company money and which cost it money. Nobody keeps a comparable ledger for the body. Without one, people fall back on how they subjectively feel.

He gives an example. One founder told him they traveled internationally but slept well and felt fine. He asked whether they had ever measured their sleep or anything else. They hadn't. His response was to ask how they could claim to be fine, or that they weren't suffering serious damage to cognition and other functions, without any data. In his view, culture gives this behavior a pass, while the data shows it is "really bad." He calls measurement "virtuous" partly because it fills the gap left by norms that push people toward harmful habits. He argues that constant travel by a sleep-deprived founder is bad for the founder, bad for investors, bad for employees, and "bad for everybody."

Mallin agreed. He suspects most people living a "CEO lifestyle" of 15 to 20 travel days a month don't notice the damage at all. Johnson: "They have no idea."

Why Jet Lag Happens

Mallin gives an evolutionary explanation. Humans evolved with a sun that rises and sets on a predictable schedule, and that produced an internal circadian rhythm. Light reaching the back of the eye, blue light in particular, is the main signal driving the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the part of the brain that generates the rhythm. Meal timing, exercise, and temperature also affect it. We did not evolve with airplanes. When you suddenly move sunrise by up to 12 hours, he says, "your brain just goes freaking haywire."

The commonly cited rule, Mallin says, is about one day of adjustment per hour of time difference. Los Angeles to Europe is roughly nine hours, so full adjustment could take up to nine days. Johnson says that matched his experience. Around days eight to ten he felt he had finally adapted, just as it was time to fly home.

Mallin adds that eastbound travel is reportedly harder than westbound. Going east you have to fall asleep earlier. Going west is more like staying up late. He finds that intuitive: staying up late is easy, while forcing himself to sleep earlier feels impossible.

Day by Day: From Fog to "Animalistic Instincts"

Johnson tracked his body closely throughout the trip and describes a progression. On days one and two the body was "in shock." It had lost a large, unexpected amount of sleep and felt confused, fatigued, and hungover. Days three and four were slightly more stable, but new problems appeared. His food preferences changed. Normally he eats vegetables, legumes, extra virgin olive oil, berries, nuts, and seeds. Now salty, fatty, calorie-dense junk food started to seem appealing. This was made worse by constant meetings and moving between locations, where that kind of food is convenient and always nearby. His mind began to drift toward "maybe I should."

By days eight and nine it felt overwhelming. What surprised him most was that by day ten he "felt like an animal," with instincts he calls "primal." Today, he says, if someone offered him a bag of chips, he would turn it down without hesitation because he would feel sick and it wouldn't be worth it. By days ten and eleven, he was thinking "huh, maybe." He says the experience took him back to his entrepreneurial years building Braintree and Venmo, when he didn't want to eat junk food every day but felt powerless to stop. His summary is that nine or ten days of sleep deprivation plus the time zone change "annihilated my willpower," taking it "to zero," and that it was "crazy to witness."

What Mallin Says Sleep Disruption Does

Mallin said he couldn't picture Johnson eating a bag of chips, but that the effect makes sense. He suspects Johnson built up a sleep deficit over the trip. He cites multiple studies showing that even about an hour of lost sleep per night can reduce willpower and make good decisions less likely, including decisions about food.

He lists other effects: brain fog, possible mood swings (which he thinks may explain the "primal" feeling), and hormonal disruption. Many hormones follow a daily pattern. Testosterone and cortisol typically peak in the morning and then decline. The gut also runs on a circadian cycle and is primed to digest at the times you usually eat. After flying to Europe, the body doesn't expect food at what feels like 2 a.m. He says all of this compounds and leaves you feeling "completely off."

Johnson said preparing for the episode surprised him. The research his team compiled showed how quickly and dramatically the body responds to losing just an hour or an hour and a half of sleep, "let alone moving 10 time zones." For the first time, he says, he could connect the scientific evidence to his own experience of hormones, microbiome disruption, blood glucose, and satiety. He believes that if people could map those patterns onto what they feel, they might reduce how much they travel.

Using Light

Mallin notes that most jet lag advice overlaps with general sleep advice. He cites studies showing evening blue light can shift melatonin release by about 40 minutes. As he explains it, the body starts producing melatonin roughly 40 minutes later than it otherwise would.

Johnson says he did only two things with light. When he boarded, he put on blue-light-blocking glasses and turned off his seatback screen so he could sleep right away and try for a full night. After landing, he tried to switch to local time immediately. He woke around 4 or 5 a.m. In Sweden, which he says had around 18 or 19 hours of daylight at that time of year, he got sunlight in his eyes for a few minutes right away.

Mallin called that reasonable. When flying east to Europe it usually makes sense to sleep on the plane, so you want to avoid blue light "at all costs": blocking glasses, a red-light setting on the phone, no screens. The mistake, he says, is stopping once you arrive. At the destination you need to avoid blue light starting about an hour before sunset, because your brain isn't yet expecting to make melatonin then and you have to "trick it." Mornings are the other half. Get outside, or get about 10,000 lux of light, during the new location's morning. Since flights to Europe often land early, he suggests going outside as soon as possible. He says that is also a good time to exercise.

Johnson describes the plan they had made: on waking, get light in the eyes, eat his usual pre-workout breakfast, then exercise. All of it tells the body it is on a new time zone and a new routine. In the evening, avoid blue light and keep bedtime consistent.

Do the Interventions Actually Matter?

Johnson then asked the question he said he had been saving for the end. Beyond light, early food, and exercise, does the rest, such as carefully timed melatonin, make a real difference? Or are people fooling themselves after shocking the body across ten time zones?

Mallin's answer: yes, somewhat. A 12-hour shift "sucks" for the body almost no matter what you do. The question is how long it sucks. These methods don't prevent symptoms. They shorten them, and he says that is what the studies show.

His main example was an interventional study in an Argentinian soccer team. It was not controlled and included only 22 men. Researchers gave the players specific melatonin doses at specific times and controlled their daylight exposure and exercise timing after arrival. For a 12-hour time difference, the players adjusted in a little over two days, which Mallin calls "pretty crazy fast." He cautioned that it was a small study, so nothing can be said for certain. The disruption still happened; they just "flipped quicker."

So the goal, Mallin says, is to reduce jet lag's duration and severity, not to prevent it. The levers that actually affect the brain's circadian rhythm are light, eating, and exercise, plus some medications. Because even perfect execution still leaves real strain on the body, he agrees with Johnson that there should be a standard limit on how much travel people accept per month.

Johnson welcomed that framing. He said most people already feel overwhelmed, and a "13-step jet lag protocol" isn't realistic when they have meetings and events to attend.

The Harms, the Olympians, and the Red-Eye

On harms, Mallin says they largely overlap with those of sleep loss. He also says time shifts are associated with higher risk of diabetes, inflammation, and cardiovascular disease, and that this can happen even to people who sleep later on weekends than on weekdays.

Both hosts discussed a study of Olympic athletes, which Johnson says covered 173 Olympic teams across 15 Games. As they describe it, athletes who might have won gold dropped to silver when they hadn't adapted their circadian rhythm to the new time zone. Mallin asks the business version of that question: are people losing deals they would otherwise have won because they arrived cognitively impaired? Johnson says that is exactly what he told the founders. In his view, those founders are like Olympic athletes who travel even more, and without counting the cost to their thinking and wellbeing, they are hurting their companies and teams.

Mallin singled out red-eye flights taken the night before important meetings. He says you cannot perform at your best after a night on a plane without sleep, while jet-lagged. He points out that Olympic athletes often arrive weeks early specifically to adapt, and still struggle. He finds it strange that people are so enthusiastic about red-eyes and heavy business travel.

Building a Travel Budget

Johnson had already proposed a rule of thumb to friends: at most one international trip per quarter, assuming roughly a 10-hour time difference and a stay of about five days. Mallin thought that was reasonable. He prefers fewer, longer trips over frequent short ones, because frequent short trips resemble shift work, which he calls extremely harmful. He cites roughly 2 to 2.5 times higher risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and death, because the body never finishes adjusting.

Johnson then narrowed the scenario to someone who must spend only three or four days abroad and fly back. That person never adapts and is essentially doing shift work. When asked what a reasonable budget would be, Mallin replied, "Can I say zero?" Johnson said he felt the same after this trip, but that the world has a lot to offer and people will look for a middle ground.

Mallin framed it as a risk-benefit calculation. Travel across that many time zones clearly harms health. It may also bring health-relevant benefits, such as business success that pays for other health spending or the enjoyment of seeing new places. Once a quarter seems reasonable to him. Three-to-four-day trips done monthly or more often put a person close to the shift-work risk category, which he doubts any benefit of travel could offset. He named once a month as the absolute limit.

Johnson later organized this into three tiers over a 90-day cycle, all for short trips of three to four days:

Extreme: one trip per month
Middle ground: one trip every 60 days
Safer: one trip every 90 days

He also reframed the thresholds around the people affected. What travel level would his children consider compatible with being a good father? What level would employees accept from a good boss? At what point would investors decide a team member's travel does the company more harm than good?

Mallin added that the tiers should cover any shift of three or more time zones, not just international trips. Pacific to Eastern time counts, in his view. He shared his own experience. He flies to the East Coast at least once a quarter and finds even that hard. When he increases it to once a month, he is generally unhappy, doesn't feel well, and sleeps badly, both during the trip and after returning. By the time his sleep recovers, the next trip arrives. From his experience, once a month is too much, once every 60 days "doesn't feel great," and once a quarter is "tolerable." He thinks that is probably right for everyone.

Recovery Time and Staying on Home Time

Johnson asked whether a three-to-four-day trip means one to two weeks of recovery. Mallin said it depends on how fully you adjusted. After three or four days you only partially adjust, so you are jet-lagged during the trip and likely need at least three or four more days after returning, depending on the distance, using roughly one day per hour of time difference. Asked whether metabolic and microbiome disruption lasts longer, Mallin said it certainly can. How long the microbiome takes to recover is somewhat unknown to them, but he says the gut takes about 4 to 10 days to normalize after international travel, and he would expect the microbiome to take at least as long.

Johnson also asked whether short-trip travelers should adapt at all, or should try to stay on home time. Mallin said staying on home time is possible but hard. You would need to avoid light, eat, sleep, and exercise on your home schedule. He sometimes does this when going from the West Coast to the East Coast, provided his schedule allows it: sleep until 10 a.m., get sunlight and exercise, work from noon to 7 p.m., go to bed around midnight. For Europe's nine-hour difference, he says it "just not going to work very well." Johnson noted that business travelers usually have meetings on local time, so most will be forced to partially adapt.

A Missing Cultural Conversation

Johnson became visibly enthusiastic about this turn in the discussion. He said no "cost accounting" has ever been done for travel. People justify it vaguely: they are working hard, they have to, they feel fine. With high-fidelity measurement and his personal data, he says they can now work out rough estimates of a reasonable travel allowance. Currently, "everyone I know is just like as much as you can do," and the costs are "hidden or deferred," left for their future selves.

Mallin agreed but noted that some listeners must travel 15 days a month to make a living. Johnson accepted that, then argued that because nobody has set limits, travel is "a free-for-all," and employers can impose travel expectations with no boundary. He recalled that a founder at the conference, after complaining that international travel is both wonderful and awful and takes forever to recover from, said they would tell their investors that Bryan Johnson allowed only one international trip per quarter.

He also recalled Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. He remembered it as visits to more than 100 countries in a short period, while acknowledging he didn't recall the exact figure. Even before he focused on health, he thought that pace was insane. At the time it was framed as heroism, and he says the conversation is now different.

Mallin summarized the difference between them: his instinct was to help people do travel better, while Johnson's was to tell them not to do it. Mallin said he respected that, and that when it comes to health, "none is reasonable." He argued that a job requiring heavy travel effectively tells an employee to expose themselves to cardiovascular disease, dementia, and early death, something no employer would say out loud. His picture of the cultural blind spot is a plane full of people drinking alcohol under bright lights and screens, with nobody sleeping.

Johnson went further. He expects that health costs will eventually be quantified in employment decisions, so that a person might calculate that two years in a particular job costs, as his hypothetical example put it, 3.4 years of life. He says people make that trade today without the numbers. He thinks their work may provide one of the best current baselines for what the cost really is, and he acknowledged that AI will change how work happens.

What Johnson Actually Did, and What Mallin Would Change

Johnson admitted his protocol was not very sophisticated. The India and China trip had about 30 events in 11 days, and Europe was similarly packed back to back, so he stuck to basics. On the plane he wore blue-light glasses, turned off the screen, fasted, and slept a full night. After landing he got light in his eyes first thing every day, then ate and exercised. He took melatonin in the evening, a double dose, and ignored any direction-specific timing guidance.

He says the biggest change on this trip was naps, which he calls "absolutely game-changing." He managed naps of about 60 minutes, longer than the usual 20. If his sleep data was accurate, he fell asleep within about a minute and got something like 52 minutes of deep sleep, which he took as a sign his body was craving it. He felt refreshed afterward in a way a 20-minute nap wouldn't give him, though he wondered whether he had slept too long.

Mallin said nap effects vary by person and that he generally doesn't recommend them because they can disrupt nighttime sleep. He also realized aloud that they had never designed a jet lag protocol before either trip, and said they should have. Johnson explained that the team is usually running about ten research projects at once and is at full capacity, so travel planning got skipped.

Mallin's recommendations:

Melatonin: Take it at the usual bedtime in the destination time zone. You can start before leaving, and continue at least the first three nights.
Extended-release melatonin: Consider combining it with immediate-release. Mallin says immediate-release lasts about an hour in the bloodstream, so many people fall asleep but wake mid-night feeling like it's mid-afternoon.
Modafinil: For destinations like Europe where you need to stay awake longer. Mallin describes a half-life of about 12 hours and a mechanism involving dopamine.
Newer sleep drugs: He mentions a melatonin receptor agonist and a newer drug that blocks orexin receptors. He describes both as non-habit-forming, lacking the downsides of benzodiazepines and Ambien, and helping protect sleep architecture, so they may be useful for travel.

Mallin calls himself "pretty bullish" on pharmacological approaches but says the core remains light exposure, shifting meal times to the destination, and morning exercise. He says those are what shorten jet lag "from 12 days to two days." When Johnson asked for the top items, Mallin listed light, sleep, exercise, and melatonin as "the basics." Johnson asked what the Argentinian team did to get from 12 days to two. Mallin said they took melatonin and got light exposure and exercise in the early morning and early afternoon, "and that's it." Johnson noted that was essentially what he had done. Mallin agreed.

Stimulants and Cold Exposure

Johnson asked about coffee, modafinil, and cold exposure. In Dubai, he says, a cryotherapy session eliminated his jet lag for about three hours. He felt energetic and alert until the effect wore off and the haze came back.

Mallin said stimulants are fine if you land in the destination's morning, which is common when flying to Europe. The mistake is taking caffeine or another stimulant after an afternoon or evening arrival. You need to give the body time to clear it before local bedtime. Otherwise you make it harder to sleep on time and worsen the jet lag.

He finds cold exposure interesting. He says some studies suggest benefits over several days after arrival when done in the morning. In his explanation, it releases epinephrine and cortisol and provides the morning cortisol boost the jet-lagged body may not produce on its own, a different mechanism from caffeine or modafinil. Johnson said he plans to try morning cold therapy on his next international trip. Mallin said it doesn't have to be cryotherapy: an ice-water face dunk or a cold shower is probably enough.

Conclusions: Marginal Gains and a Changed Person

Johnson summarized the episode. He came in wanting an instruction manual for minimizing jet lag, because that is what people ask for. Instead the discussion concluded that people probably should travel internationally less than they currently do or think they can, because the damage is significant and affects their families, coworkers, investors, and everyone around them. People may believe they are being heroic, he says, but it harms everyone. He considers the most valuable idea to be a shared expectation that "there is such a thing as too much international travel," using the three-to-four-day trip per month, per 60 days, or per 90 days as a rough guide. He says he has never heard anyone make that claim.

Mallin agreed. He said the literature supports some benefits, but they are marginal, on the order of "a 15% improvement" or "a 50% improvement," and no intervention or combination resolves jet lag. Culture, he says, will have to decide whether to keep tolerating it at current levels or change.

Johnson returned to what struck him most. In 11 days of deliberately reduced sleep, he "literally became a different person": his thinking, desires, willpower, discipline, mood, and balance of optimism and pessimism all changed. After years of stable routines and thought patterns, he found this alarming. Now, he says, he understands people in that state who insist they are fine, and he considers their condition an "absolute emergency."

Mallin pointed out the contrast in the room itself: Johnson describing himself as a different person, and Kate too sick to attend. Johnson said both of them had felt a tickle in their throats. After another late night at the conference the day before, he thinks that pushed Kate over the edge, while his daytime nap may have protected him. He feels mostly fine, with only "a teeny bit" of sickness. He passed along a remark from Kate that morning: future generations may look back at how casually people today treat getting sick. Mallin added that they might also note people ate bags of chips, flew across time zones, and kept working while ill.

Johnson closed with a personal change. When he talks to people about their health, he has usually focused on sleep and exercise. From now on he plans to also ask about travel: what their schedule looks like and how many time zones they cross each month.

The study on the Olympic athletes, it was 173 Olympic teams across 15 games. What they saw is that athletes who might have won the gold dropped to silver if they hadn't recovered from the circadian rhythm adaptation. They could have gotten gold, but they got silver instead, which is pretty terrible. But this is costing them in performance. So, it's actually hurting their companies and their teams.

I mean, these athletes are typically flying, you know, like weeks in advance to prepare and allow their bodies to shift so that they can perform at their highest level and they're still having difficulty. If you're an elite athlete and you spent 4 years preparing for this event, like man, I would not mess around with circadian rhythm and not getting adapted to that new time zone. So, it's a very real phenomena.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Bryan Johnson podcast. Today we're talking about jet lag and sadly our friend Kate is not here today because she's sick. We spent 11 days in Europe and it was damaging. Today we're going to talk about what the right amount of international travel is and what you can do about it. Let's go.

Mike, we're down. We're down to team eight today.

I was just thinking the same thing. It's going to be weird without Kate here.

It is. How do you feel about this?

I don't know. I'm a little nervous. I'm being honest.

Yeah. Who's going to... No one can fill her shoes.

Yeah, it's true. I called her this morning like, "How you doing?" And it was a bad situation.

She's been teetering for a couple days and it just went the wrong way yesterday.

Yeah. In some ways, I'm sure she doesn't feel like being on a podcast right now, but it'd be kind of great to have her on to talk about maybe why she's sick.

Yeah. Even just a very, very brief appearance would be helpful.

But I think about all the times I've traveled and how often I get sick. There's nothing with a greater likelihood of making me sick than time on an airplane, especially if there's a big change in time zones.

So, I guess the backdrop on this is Kate and I just got back from 11 days of international travel and we did an experiment where we went really hard. So, we stayed up later than normal. We got less sleep than normal. I did do a few naps here and there, which we'll talk about, but we went really hard for 11 days and we saw this continuous decline in almost all things. Every day we feel like we lost three or four IQ points. Our brains became a bit more, you know, foggy. We became a bit more grumpy. We wanted bad foods. It just was like this progression. We both saw where it was going. It was a bad situation.

Why did you do this? What was the hypothesis? Like, let's see if we can kill ourselves with travel?

Yeah. Yes. I mean, we rarely do international travel. We did India and China last year for two weeks and it was fantastic. I mean, it really is important for Don't Die, like be out and about, and we got to see so many people in these two countries. So it was definitely worth it from what we're trying to achieve in life, but also it came at this massive cost.

And I hadn't really felt jet lag since I've been doing Blueprint. So I remember from previous times in life, but I wasn't as acutely aware of how I feel. Then this trip I had hyper awareness of my states, and so really, yeah, it taught me these incredibly valuable lessons about what actually happens to the body when you travel internationally and you couple that with not ideal sleep.

Well, it's a bummer that we don't have Kate here today, but it's sort of a little bit perfect for what we're going to talk about today. Do you want to introduce the topic, Bryan?

Yes. Today we are talking about jet lag. And I've learned more about this topic in the past week than I have in my entire life, and experiencing this firsthand has really allowed me to see this with clarity. I just came back from a conference yesterday where I was with about 150 founders, really accomplished individuals. Their companies are growing extraordinarily fast and it's just taken as a default that if you're in this position, you travel internationally all the time and you're always switching time zones and you kind of just grin and bear it, but you just do it because it's part of the job.

But the thing, the point I was trying to make to these founders, is that they're doing this, but they don't see the actual accounting of the effects on the body. And, you know, just like their company, they see when they do things that make money and they see the things they do that cost them money. But when you do things for the body, like when you travel internationally or don't get great sleep, you don't necessarily have an accounting of what is happening inside the body. And so therefore you default to your subjective feelings. And so this week has been really helpful in going through the science and my own personal experience looking at my own data. What happens when you travel internationally? And so today we're going to talk about jet lag: what it is, what's happening inside the body, and what you can do about it.

Awesome. Yeah. What you were saying just a minute ago about how now that you've started doing Blueprint, you're so hyper aware of how you feel when you travel. I bet a lot of these people that you're talking with at this conference don't even really realize the damage that they could potentially be doing to their bodies with regular travel. You know, the CEO lifestyle of, you know, traveling 15, 20 days a month. They probably don't even really pick up on it, right?

They have no idea. I was talking to this one woman and she's like, "You know what? I travel internationally, but I sleep well. I think I'm fine." I said, "Have you ever measured your sleep? Like, do you know actually what's happening? Or have you measured anything else?" She's like, "No." And I'm like, "Well, how can you say that things are fine or that you're somehow not experiencing severe damage in your cognition and other bodily functions?" The thing is, it is culturally acceptable to just give it a pass, but if you actually look at the data, it's really bad. So I think measurement is actually virtuous for so many reasons, but also it's filling this gap where cultural norms have emerged that have encouraged people to do certain things that are really bad for them. It's bad for the investors for the founder to be rolling around the entire world. It is bad for investors for the founders not getting sleep. It is bad for a boss. It's bad for everybody.

I think jet lag is really interesting because there's an evolutionary understanding of why jet lag happens in the first place. We as humans evolved with the sun, right? Throughout our entire history there has been a sun that comes up for some number of hours during the day and then goes down. And that through evolution has created a circadian rhythm in our bodies, right? Our bodies expect to see this light. And what happens is the light actually hits the back of our eyes. Specifically, it's a type of light. It's blue light. And it activates that circadian rhythm. It's the primary thing that drives the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the part of the brain that creates the rhythm. And it's also impacted by things like when you eat, when you exercise; temperature can affect it as well.

And when we travel, you know, we didn't evolve with airplanes. So our bodies aren't used to, like, hey, I'm just going to all of a sudden switch the time of day that the sun comes up by 12 hours. Your brain just goes freaking haywire, you know? It doesn't know what to do. So they say it takes about a day for every hour of travel that you do. So if you went from, let's see, you went from LA to Europe, right? So what, seven hours, 8 hours, is that right?

Nine hours.

So theoretically it could take you up to like 9 days to actually get your body completely flipped. So I'm curious, you just did this. What was the time frame? How long did it take you to go from, you know, feeling terrible obviously when you got there to starting to feel better?

Yeah, that's about right. By day eight, nine, 10, I thought I'm finally in this new circadian rhythm, at the very tail end of when we were about to leave.

Yeah, perfect.

I know. The other direction.

They actually say that eastbound travel is worse than westbound travel because you are speeding up rather than slowing down. So you get there and then you have to go to sleep earlier and then you wake up at a different time, as opposed to slowing down if you're going west. It's almost just like staying up later. Which makes sense to me, because it always feels easier to stay up later than it does to go to bed earlier. Go to bed earlier, my body's just like, I'm not doing this. Sorry. No way. But staying up later, it's like now I can go to sleep, and it's easier to go that direction.

Yeah. You know, the entire time I was actually monitoring my body so closely. I noticed on day one, day two, your body's in shock. You've missed a substantial portion of unexpected sleep and your body's just kind of confused. You feel that fatigue and that overhang. And then day three, four, you stabilize just a little bit, but then other things kick in, like you notice that the kinds of foods you want to eat change. So instead of your typical, I mean my protocol of eating veggies, legumes, extra virgin olive oil, berries, nuts, seeds, now for the first time something salty or something fatty or these high calorie dense junk foods start appearing, like, you know what, maybe. And that's coupled with when you're out and about and you're trying to do all your meetings and go from place to place and those things are conveniently present. It's like your mind starts drifting, like maybe I should. And so you start seeing this drift in mind state, and then by eight, nine, it just gets overwhelming.

The thing that surprised me is by day 10 I felt like an animal. I had animalistic instincts. It was so primal. Right now, if I were to be offered a bag of chips, I would say no, that's awful. I'm going to feel sick and it's not worth the trade-off. By day 10 or 11, I was kind of like, huh, maybe. It really changed my relationship with these foods so substantially. It transported me back in time to my entrepreneurial days building Braintree Venmo, where I really didn't want to eat junk food every day, but I was powerless to stop myself. But basically, 9, 10 days of sleep deprivation plus the international travel to the different time zone annihilated my willpower. It took me to zero. It was actually crazy to witness.

That's interesting. So, first off, I can't imagine you eating a bag of chips. That kind of blows my mind. But it does sort of make sense if you think about what's happening when you've got this sort of sleep disruption, right? My guess is you were probably having difficulty sleeping those nights. So you accumulated a sleep deficit over those days. And what we do know from multiple different studies is that the more sleep deficit you create, just an hour a night will actually change your willpower and can decrease your likelihood of making good decisions. We'll see people make different decisions when they're actually eating. And other things can happen too, right? So not only are you making poor decisions, you're also probably going to experience brain fog, maybe even mood swings, which I would guess describes sort of those primal instincts. Your hormones get screwed up, because our hormones are actually on a daily variation, right? Sex hormones peak typically in the morning, at least for men. Testosterone peaks in the morning, it trickles down. Cortisol peaks in the morning, trickles down.

There's also, you know, expected times that your body's used to eating. So your gut works on a circadian cycle as well, where basically it's ready and primed to eat at the times of day that you typically feed it, right? So if you switch and go to Europe, then now the body is not expecting to see food at what feels like 2:00 in the morning. And all that stuff builds up, screws your brain up, and really makes you feel completely off.

Yeah. In preparing for this podcast today, looking over the science that the team put together, I was really surprised at how dramatic and how fast changes happen in the body with even a very slight shift. You miss an hour, an hour and a half of sleep, how dramatically the body shifts in response, let alone moving 10 time zones. It absolutely wrecks the body. So I was really surprised to see the evidence and then also to experience it and to see this for the first time in my life.

Yeah, Mike, I think the thing that was most educational for me during this trip is it's the first time that I actually really was aware of the scientific evidence and experienced international travel for the first time, and I could piece together these various things from hormones to microbiome disruption to blood glucose to satiety. You know, how do I feel after food? So maybe we can go through these things. But I think a lot of people just don't understand the significance of how badly things are disrupted and in what ways. And if they could see the patterns and then map it back to what they're experiencing, it might give them a bit more awareness and help them maybe modulate the amount of international travel they do. We're going to talk in a minute about maybe a rule of thumb: if you do travel internationally, what is a budget you can set for how much time is prudent before it crosses over some threshold. So do you want to go over some of the scientific evidence we have dug up here on just awareness of what's happening, and then also some of the things people can do to mitigate it?

Sure. So a lot of the stuff are things that we already talk about around sleep in general, right? For example, blue light exposure. Blue light exposure is obviously something that you've talked about a ton, how we should avoid blue light exposure because it limits the amount of melatonin production. So there's been studies on this, and some of these studies have shown that just evening blue light exposure can actually advance your melatonin release by about 40 minutes. So that means your body is not naturally producing melatonin until 40 minutes after you would typically produce it because of that blue light exposure. So that's one example. I'm curious, on this trip, Bryan, how did you use blue light as you were traveling to, I guess, improve your sleep on the plane or when you got to the location? What did you do to augment blue light?

Yeah, I only really did two things on light. First is when I had boarded the plane, I had blue light blocking glasses on and then I turned my screen off in front of me to avoid any kind of disruption so I could go to sleep first thing on the plane and try to get a full night's sleep. And then two is when we landed, I tried to immediately get on that time zone. So I woke up in the morning, actually I think around 4:00 or 5 in the morning, but in Sweden it's light I think like 18 hours a day or 19 hours a day at this point. So I get up and immediately get sunlight in my eyes for a few minutes.

So, trying to adapt. So, would you have suggested I did anything else to help that adaptation process?

I think it's reasonable what you want to do when you're getting on the plane if you're

planning to sleep and typically when you're going east to Europe it does make sense to sleep. So you just want to avoid blue light at all costs. So blue light blocking glasses, red light on your phone, don't watch the screens, things that you've talked about before, these all make total sense. But then you have to sort of keep that up once you get to location. So like once you're in Europe, you have to make sure that you're not giving your eyes any blue light in that time that you're trying to wind down. So as soon as the sun is setting or really like an hour before the sun starts setting, you really want to avoid blue light so you can start telling your brain, hey, it's almost time to go to bed, because your brain is not expecting to produce melatonin at that time. So you have to sort of trick it, right?

The other thing I would say, and this has been looked at as well, is using sunlight in the morning at your location for telling your brain that hey, it's morning time. And this means like getting outside or getting like, you know, 10,000 lux light exposure at what is morning time in the new location, right? So, if you're traveling to Europe, one way you could do this is, you know, you land typically early in the morning, get outside as quickly as possible, get sunlight in your face. Also, a great time to exercise.

Yeah. I mean, I guess like on the backdrop, I was going to save this question until the end, but we're going to talk about a lot of strategies on what you can do. And so, like, we planned this out where I said when I land, I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to get light in my eyes first thing. I'm going to have my morning breakfast, which I do normally, my pre-workout breakfast, and then next I'm going to exercise. And they say hey body, like doing all these things to say we are on a new time zone, change the circadian rhythm on a new protocol here. And then of course you can do things like later in the evening avoid blue light, try to be consistent in your bedtime.

But overall, do you think these things actually make a meaningful difference, or are we basically under some kind of illusion that these actions do anything to help us whatever, because you've shocked your body over 10 time zones? Like the more I got into the science on this and I saw like you time melatonin here and do this there.

And even we looked at the Olympic athlete study, that was actually really cool too. But I guess I wonder, overall, do you think these things meaningfully make, outside of light in the eyes, eating first thing and exercising? Do you think these other things actually make a big difference, or are you basically just like the majority of the damage is done and you just have to let the body adapt?

I feel like we're jumping to the headline here. That's cool. So sometimes a little bit. Yes. This matters. So like, you know, traveling to Europe or 12-hour time shift sucks and it's going to suck for your body almost no matter what you do. It's a matter of how long does it suck, right? So, like the modalities we're talking about are not going to prevent these symptoms. It's just going to shorten the duration of symptoms. And that's what a lot of these studies have shown.

Like for example, the interventional trial that we looked at where it's melatonin, exercise timing, and light exposure in professional athletes. This was like a study that was a non-controlled study that they did in an Argentinian soccer team, only 22 males, but they basically very specifically gave them a certain amount of melatonin at a certain time of night. They controlled when they got daylight exposure when they got to the location and when they exercised. And they found that the time shift for a 12-hour difference, so this is a 12-hour time zone difference, that time shift only took their bodies a little over two days, which is pretty crazy fast. So a small study, like can't say it for sure. It didn't prevent the time shift difficulty. So it didn't prevent the changes related to the circadian rhythm mess up, but it just made it shorter. So they flipped quicker basically.

So what we're talking about when we talk about all these modalities for improving jet lag, it's not about like preventing jet lag as much as it is just reducing the duration and the severity of the jet lag. And I do think a lot of these work, and it makes sense to focus on these things that actually do affect the circadian rhythm in the brain, which we know is light, eating, and exercise. Really, that's about it. Like those are the primary levers outside of medications. And there are some medications we should probably talk about around this because they are interesting. We can maybe get to those in a little bit. But yeah, I do think it matters. But it also does still suck.

And that's why I think something that you alluded to earlier, like we should have a standard for what is the limit that I'll expose my body to in a month in terms of travel, because like no matter how good you are at implementing these interventions, you're still subjecting your body to some pretty difficult stuff.

That's really helpful context and a backdrop because I was thinking through, people are going to listen to this and most people already feel overwhelmed with life, and to then add on, you know, like a 13-step jet lag protocol is just not practical. They've got meetings to get to, they've got things to, like events to attend. And so I was trying to set the context because I'm sure that many people are going to feel overwhelmed. And so,

so, okay, the point you're making is there's interesting evidence. It's not conclusive, but that you can actually do a few things to lessen the severity and accelerate that adaptation process outside the three things: light, exercise, and food first thing in the morning. Do you want to go into the evidence on the harm of jet lag first and then we do protocols, or what do you want to do?

We can talk a little bit about the harm. I mean the harm is pretty much the same harms that we know from lack of sleep to some extent. There are some other things, like, you know, for example we see an increased risk of diabetes, inflammation, cardiovascular disease whenever there's a time shift, and that could even happen for people who like sleep later on the weekends as opposed to their regular times during the week. There's, you know, other studies that have shown that basically, like there was the one in the Olympic athletes that you talked about that I think is really interesting, where like they could have gotten gold but they got silver instead, which is pretty terrible, but like just such an interesting outcome study of like, you know, what's happening to like business people in that case, right? Like, you know, are you missing deals because you didn't appropriately manage your sleep with travel that you would have gotten otherwise, because you're not cognitively performing as well? Pretty interesting.

That was exactly my thought, and this is what I was referencing when I was speaking to these founders. These are some of the most elite founders in the entire world. And as I heard them talking, I thought this is just catastrophic, because the study on the Olympic athletes, it was 173 Olympic teams across 15 games. And like you said, what they saw is that athletes who might have won the gold dropped to silver if they hadn't recovered from the circadian rhythm adaptation. And so it really is, I mean if you're an elite athlete and you spent four years preparing for this event, like man, I would not mess around with circadian rhythm and not getting adapted to that new time zone, but it's a significant thing. And so yeah, these founders who are basically Olympic level, you know, professional athletes are doing this international travel at an even more robust pace than these guys. They're traveling more, but this is costing them in performance. So it's actually hurting their companies and their teams because they're not fully accounting for the cost on their cognition and overall well-being. They're actually lessening their performance. So it's a very real phenomena.

Yeah. I wonder about like those people who choose to take the redeye the night before the morning of the meeting, and they're in this meeting after a redeye flight and it's an important meeting. Like you cannot be, you know, at your best, you cannot be performing at a cognitively superior level if you haven't slept, you've been on a plane all night and you're jetlagged. It's crazy. I mean these athletes are typically flying, you know, like weeks in advance to prepare and allow their bodies to shift so that they can perform at their highest level, and they're still having difficulty. So yeah, it's interesting to me that people are so bullish on, I guess, red-eyes and also just the amount of travel that they're willing to do for business.

I hope this really marks a shift in culture. I mean for example, I was trying to create a rule of thumb for my friends, and I suggested to them one international trip per quarter max. And so let's just say that the time zone change, let's call it 10 hours, that you get one, and let's call it the average duration is five days. Your budget is one per quarter, no more.

I think that's reasonable. I think that like really I prefer longer duration travel to shorter regular travel. So if you can take one flight where you actually give your body a chance to sort of flip, that's probably better than taking multiple shorter flights, because that's much closer to shift work, which we know is extremely bad, right? Like shift work is, you know, two to 2.5 times increased risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and dementia and all of the, you know, and death, all the bad things, right? And that's because your body doesn't get a chance to actually make that circadian rhythm shift. So, taking like one international flight in a quarter gives you a chance to get that work done, right? But at the same time allowing your body an easier shifting process both there and back.

Let's reason through this if we can. I think it'd be really helpful if we could give people a rule of thumb on what is an allowable budget for international travel. Let's assume for sake of discussion that a person's going to spend three to four days in that time zone, that they're not going to be able to be there for a full, you know, 9, 10 days. It's too much time. They've got to go there, attend an event or have an important meeting, and then come back. So, they're doing basically shift work, right? They don't have the time to adapt. So, someone is running a company or, you know, their job requires them to do international travel. What is a reasonable budget for them for that kind of travel?

And we're talking about international travel there for 3 to four days?

Yes. Yeah. Let's say the baseline is, let's say it's

Can I say zero?

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I mean, I feel the same way after doing this. But of course, like, you know, the world has so much to offer. It's really nice and sometimes there's that middle ground to play. Let's say someone does need or want to have international travels.

I mean, I think this is one of those things where you're balancing something that has a clear negative effect on your health, right? And there may be other positives that it has on your health, right? Like, you know, if you're successful in your business, you have more money to then spend on other aspects of your health, or potentially more time to spend on those things that are beneficial to your health. If you enjoy traveling, there might be benefit associated with spending time in a new place that you've never experienced before. So it's a risk-benefit situation. In general, like any travel with that amount of time zone difference is going to have a negative impact on your health. So I would try to limit it to something as reasonable as possible. For me, like I think once a quarter sounds reasonable. That gets you to location, but it's not, you know, hampering your body on a regular basis. When you're talking about 3 to 4 days, you know, that's not far from like the amount of shift work that we're talking about that causes, you know, damage if done, you know, once a month or more. So, I think like if you're doing that once a month, you're putting yourself pretty much in that like risk category as shift work, in my opinion. And that would be concerning. Like that would be difficult to counteract that negative with any positives from travel in my mind. So, I would say no more than once a month would be the absolute limit.

So if we said that, if you want to push the envelope, one time per month, three to four days, that person is going to have a recovery time of one to two weeks for the body to get back into normalization. Is that right? Like the recovery time period post international travel is substantial.

Yeah. So it sort of depends on if you've totally flipped or not. If you've only been there for three or four days, then you're not completely flipping. You're partially flipping, right? So that 3 or 4 days you're not going to be normal, right? So you're jetlagged during those three to four days. And then you're likely, depending on how far you've traveled, you're likely going to be at least three or four more days before you return back to normal. Right? In your case, you went to Europe for what, like 10 days, so it's going to take you a lot longer to resolve back. But if we're going for 3 to 4 days, then we would expect, you know, per time zone, one day per hour of time zone change.

And then do you think some of the metabolic disruptions, microbiome, etc., do you think those potentially carry on longer than 3 to 4 days for the body to renormalize post the travel?

Certainly can. Yeah. I mean, microbiome changes are a bit of an unknown for us in terms of how long it takes to get back to normal, but we know that the gut is going to take at least, you know, anywhere from 4 to 10 days to return back to normal after international travel. So, you would suspect that the microbiome is going to be at least the same, if not more.

And so, all right, so if we're starting to sketch this out, if somebody is really wanting to push the envelope, they could travel one time per month, 3 to four days. They could, while there, when they're there, because they're not fully adapting to the time frame, do they still do the same things, wake up in the morning, sunlight, exercise, and food, or do they have a different protocol because they're not fully adapting to that time zone?

Yeah, that's a good question. So the question is, do I try to maintain my time zone that I came from? And that is possible but very hard to do in most realities, right? So the way you would have to do that is you would have to avoid light, you would have to eat on your regular time zone, you would have to sleep on your regular time zone, and you would have to exercise on your regular time zone. If you're just going to, say, the East Coast from the West Coast, that can be possible if you've got a pretty lax job where you can be like, hey, I'm not coming in until noon, and like, you know, you sleep until, you know, 10:00 a.m., wake up, get some sunlight, get exercise, go in at noon, work from noon to 7:00, you know, and then don't go to bed until midnight or something like that. You could actually do that. And I actually do that sometimes when I travel to the East Coast. That is possible. That's very hard to do when you're going all the way to Europe because you're on a completely flipped time zone. It's a 9-hour difference. It just not going to

work very well, right? And like you have to because you have to completely avoid the light. You have to completely eat on your time zone times. But it's possible in some with some changes. So in most cases you're going to end up with some jet lag where you're forced to sort of partially switch and then you're going to have that recovery time when you get back.

Yeah. So I think you know most people it's going to be impractical because the use case here is for people traveling for work and so when they arrive in the new time zone they probably have meetings and events that are happening on that local time zone. So there's just no way they'll be able to superimpose their agenda.

So all right. So, first thing is if you're really pushing the envelope and you're willing to take some damage in exchange for your ambitious pursuits, one time per month is max. And even in that, you know, you're still going to be forced to adapt in those smaller time frames because you just need to be present in those meetings.

Let's say somebody who is willing, I guess what the thing we're trying to identify here is when the cost starts becoming so substantial it actually harms the person and their ability to make good decisions or like crosses some kind of threshold where it's like kind of suicidal. You know, like there's some harm equation where we're willing to say yes to certain things as a trade-off of life's realities, that there's a different level where you really are engaging in behavior that is just

that just like is damaging. Yeah. And damaging beyond

drinking.

Yes. There we go. Yeah. So you cross into a threshold where it just doesn't pass a reason, like nobody wants this to happen. It's the kind of self-sacrifice that nobody wants. I mean, it's like kamikaze-like behavior.

Yeah.

If they feel really motivated about their mission or purpose, they're going to come up with their arguments of like, I've got to do it because of blank blank blank. I get it. But you're definitely in like red zone territory. Okay. So, let's say that is number one. Let's say somebody's now doing a more moderate approach where they do need to be present internationally for certain things, business or pleasure. What's the middle ground? The next one.

What's the middle ground? The middle ground I think would be like, yeah, it would be once every three months. Travel once every 3 months for me. It seems reasonable.

What you're talking about, Bryan, is a lot like the discussion around sleep in my mind, right? Like, you know, there's this mentality that I have to pull all-nighters to make my business successful, right? And I'm sacrificing for that. In the same way that there's this mentality that I have to travel this much to make my business successful. But what we don't see is the missed opportunities because bad decisions are being made because you didn't sleep or because you've traveled so much that your brain's not performing as well cognitively as it should. It's these missed opportunities and these unrealized reductions in performance within ourselves that you're now aware of because you've been doing Blueprint for long enough that you can tell, like, man, I am off. I'm feeling primal. I need to eat a bag of chips. Wait, this isn't me. Why am I feeling like this? You're aware of that stuff now because you know what good feels like, right? And so many people have spent so much time not knowing what good feels like that they are continuously putting themselves in these situations where they're not ready to perform because they're not sleeping or because they're traveling too much. So it's one of those things where you don't really know how much better you could be performing until you dial back on the thing that is causing the negative impact in your health.

Yeah. Okay. I figured out how I would articulate this. So let's look at these tiers. Let's just say the people around you, what would be the threshold for them? So for example, my children, what would they say would be my threshold to be a good father? And let's say my employees, what would they say would be a good boss? You know, even though the company benefits by the person traveling internationally by doing deals and being present and doing other things, at some point it becomes damaging, right? It becomes not a positive thing but a negative thing. And then from an investor perspective, at what point do you not want your team members to be doing this because again it inflicts more damage upon the company than not. So let's just say those are the thresholds where it's the people around you which suffer the most given these things as the threshold.

So there's probably like, we're keeping this on a 90-day cycle. If you want to do the extreme, one 3 to 4 day trip per month would be the extreme. One 3 to 4 day trip every 60 days would be middle ground, and one 3 to 4 day trip every 90 days would be on the safer side. These are for quick trips.

That feels pretty good. And I think it's important that we talk about time zone difference there. So when you describe those trips, I would actually not just include international, I would include three time zones. I think Pacific to East falls into this category. So personally, I travel to the East Coast at least once a quarter, right? And that's hard. And if I push that and I go to once a month, I am unhappy in general. I don't feel well. I have trouble sleeping. And not just while I'm there, but when I get home, by the time I'm back to feeling like I'm sleeping again, it's time for the next trip. So just from my own personal experience, once a month is too much, once every 60 days doesn't feel great, and then once a quarter is tolerable. And I think that's probably good for everyone, to be honest.

Yeah. You know, I love this conversation so much because a cost accounting has never been done for this kind of thing. Mhm.

We just do hand-wavy things of like, but I'm working so hard. I've got to do it. I feel fine. Yeah, it sucks, but I'm okay. There's not been an evaluation of data only. And given that we now have, with what we're doing, this high-fidelity measurement and we see from both the evidence and my personal data just how damaging it is, we can now back into these really back-of-the-envelope calculations of what is a reasonable allocation of time for international travel. Right now everyone I know is just like, as much as you can do. There's no limitations at all in people's planning. And so I like this a lot, that there actually could be a reasonable back-of-the-envelope approach which will get better and better. We'll get higher fidelity data. We'll know more and more, then we can just say this is the trade-off space, whereas right now the costs are largely hidden or deferred. And so it's just a problem for future self to address. So I love this, that we're now at a point as a species where we can begin evaluating our cultural norms in the context of what it's costing us in life.

Yeah, totally. I agree with you. This is a good conversation to have. I think it's also good though to recognize that as much as many of us would like to not travel as much, some of us have to for our livelihood, right? So, there are definitely people who are going to be listening to this who are saying, "That's great, Bryan. Thanks, but I got to travel, you know, 15 days a month." So, we should probably talk about specifically what those people can do outside of just trying not to travel as much to improve their jet lag. So maybe a good place to start would be just talking about what your approach has been, your own protocol. What are the things that you're thinking about when you're traveling around some of the stuff that we've talked about that we know impacts it, around light exposure, around diet, around exercise? What are you doing on your protocol?

Yeah, I mean, so just one final comment as we move on to this next topic is that when I was talking to this founder, he was saying, I hate international travel. Of course I love being there once I get there and I get to do the event or to see people, I love it, it's great. Also it's awful and I feel terrible and it takes me forever to recover. He lives, like we all experience, these two sides. And then he said, I'm going to tell my investors that Bryan Johnson told me I can only travel internationally one time per quarter. And that really stuck with me because, even so, what you're saying, Mike, is true, that a lot of people's livelihoods depend upon them to travel internationally, or not even internationally but through time zones. Yes, totally true. Also, because there's no boundaries that anybody has set, it's a free-for-all. And so that means people can put expectations on others. Like, as part of your job, we expect you to travel blank. And that's really potentially not a good thing for anybody in that equation.

So to me, this is actually a really awesome conversation because it opens up the dialogue of what actually is an appropriate level of travel that anybody can imagine, whether it be their own want or whether someone else is part of a job. This to me is just absent from a global conversation and it's very damaging. I think society is actually less well because we don't have guidelines. I remember when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, she visited, I forget, like 100-plus countries in some small duration of time. And at the time I wasn't doing health, but I was just like, that is insane. How can this person maintain, how can she be standing on her own two feet with that kind of insanity of travel, flipping around these different time zones? But that's like a story of heroism, right? You want to applaud it. But now it's just a different conversation. So yeah, you can tell I'm really digging the conversation. It went in a different direction.

Yeah, no, I like what you're saying though because you're right. I think my urge is to like, let's tell people how to make it better, and you're like, let's tell people not to do it, which I totally respect. Because I honestly, I mean, I led with, can I tell people not to travel? You were trying to get me to commit to a time frame, like what's reasonable, and honestly none is reasonable when it comes to health. So we do need to do a better job of directing the cultural expectations and norms. And I do think it's really interesting, the point that you bring up around expectations around travel for employees, is like telling somebody, I expect you to treat yourself poorly. You need to expose yourself to cardiovascular disease and dementia and early death because that's what this business expects. You can't say that, right? But we can tell people to travel and expose themselves to those sorts of risks. Culturally we don't talk about these risks or understand them. And it's clear when you get on a plane and everybody's drinking alcohol and there's bright lights everywhere and screens and nobody's sleeping. We just don't respect the damage that travel can do in our culture, and we need to. So I agree with you. You're making great points.

And we're also inevitably heading into a future where we will have the cost accounting for health, where right now it's like, okay, I'm going to have this job which pays me blank per year in salary, and then in exchange for that I learn certain skills, I progress in my career, I can achieve certain things which allow me to pursue other opportunities in the future. But then on the flip side, the cost side, is okay, but at what expense? What are you asking me to do? Am I working 20 hours a day? Am I traveling to 14 countries every year? And then you could basically say, okay, if I do this job for two years, I'm basically going to pay with 3.4 years of life. So I'm basically trading life for that financial compensation.

And that's real. I mean, people are doing that today. It's happening. We just don't have the numbers. I think what's cool about what we're doing right now is we're probably providing the best baseline in the world of what that cost structure is, of what people truly pay in that exchange. Now, of course, this is in the backdrop of AI where the workplace dynamics are going to change a lot and how we do things will change a lot more so than the past, but this has really been a missing piece of the conversation, that wellness has not been in the accounting stack and also not part of the dialogue of what is reasonable to ask somebody to do in exchange for that.

I 100% agree with you. I also 100% think that people want to hear what your protocol is.

Yeah. I mean, honestly, okay, I'll show you what my protocol is, but I don't honestly think it's that great because I haven't gone to the absolute edges of that protocol. I know there's more things I could do, but then again, when I'm traveling internationally, like when we did China and India, we did something like 30 events in 11 days. And then same with Europe, we were back-to-back every second of the day. And so I just really tried to do the basics. When I got on the plane, blue light glasses, turned the screen off. I did not eat. I was fasting. I went to sleep, I got a full night's sleep. That was great. When I land, light in the eyes every single day, first thing. Yep, exercise and food. And then outside of that, I do melatonin in the evenings, which I think there's actually some science to say that melatonin, I guess when you're going west to east, anyways, there's some timing on melatonin that you can do, but I didn't even adhere to that. I took melatonin in the evening. I took a double dose like we talked about. But outside of that, I really didn't. Oh, also the biggest thing I did on this trip is I incorporated naps.

They were absolutely game-changing. So, yeah, I was able to sneak in like 60-minute naps, so longer than 20 minutes. And if my sleep data was correct, I was out in like one minute and I was getting something like 52 minutes of deep sleep. My body was just craving sleep. So I had incredibly sound sleep. I'd wake up after that post-nap. So maybe I was sleeping too long, but it definitely helped me feel rejuvenated in a way that a 20-minute nap wouldn't. So what would you say? Was that a bad practice or a good one?

The naps are variable from person to person. I generally don't recommend them because it can disrupt the actual sleeping cycle. I'm having the thought, Bryan, that we didn't really talk about your sleep jet lag protocol before you went on either of these trips for some reason, and thinking, why didn't we? We should have dialed this in a little bit more. So the melatonin thing I would stick with before bed, at typical bedtime, destination bedtime, right? And you can even start that before you leave, so you can actually take it before you leave for whatever the destination is, right? And then you take melatonin at least for the first three nights. So just in general, one thing I would say is I am pretty bullish on pharmacological interventions for jet lag. Not just like I like melatonin.

I also like extended release melatonin. So even using a combination of instant plus extended, because the instant release melatonin only lasts for about an hour in your bloodstream. And for a lot of people, they'll fall asleep but then they wake up in the middle of the night and then they feel like it's, you know, 3:00 in the afternoon and they can't go back to sleep.

So the extended release can be helpful. I also really like, for places where you're traveling and you have to stay up for a longer period, like for example Europe, I like modafinil. Modafinil has a half-life of about 12 hours, keeps you awake through activating dopamine in your brain and can be really helpful.

There's also some newer medications that are really interesting. There's one that activates melatonin receptors, it's a melatonin receptor agonist. That one's really interesting, as well as there's a new one that blocks orexin receptors in the brain. And both of those are non-habit forming, don't have any of the downsides that a lot of the benzodiazepines, Ambien, things like that have, and actually help protect sleep architecture. So it could be potentially beneficial for travel.

So yeah, I think all of these things are super interesting. There's lots of opportunities. In general, the things that you're saying though are the basis, right? It's the light exposure, it's the digestion, switching your eating cycle to wherever you're going. It's the exercise in the morning. Those are the things that are going to have that impact where it shortens that duration of jet lag from 12 days to two days. And that's really important. So maybe there's some opportunity for improvement in general with pharmacologics, but you're doing all the basics really well.

Yeah. So for those of you listening, I guess this is a window into our world. So before I left on this trip, I mean at any given time we are researching and pursuing, you know, 10 things simultaneously. So when we do our team calls on a daily basis, we lock in so much stuff. And so it wasn't that we just didn't think about the international travel, it's just that we are absolutely maxed out in our capacity in pursuing our various research projects.

But yeah, you're right, Mike. We actually didn't set up an international travel protocol. We really should have. I mean, I was basically doing what I did before in India and China with, you know, the power laws. So, why don't we clean this up for listeners? So if somebody is traveling internationally, should we break this out into east and west? Or is that too granular?

I think that might be a little granular. Let's just hit the very basics, like what are the top five things you can do with international travel to improve. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Cool. So we covered the basics of light, sleep, exercise. Let's talk about, will you list out the pharmacological interventions or the melatonin? What can people do in addition to those basics?

In addition to the basics of the light, sleep, exercise, melatonin.

Yeah.

Those are the basics. Those are the five things.

Oh, interesting. Okay. What did this group do to reduce symptom time from 12 days to two days?

So they took melatonin, right? And then they did light exposure and exercise in the early morning and the early afternoon, and that's it.

Oh, that's it. I mean, that's what I was doing.

Yeah. They're doing what you're doing. Yeah.

Interesting.

Basically.

Okay. All right. Mike, as the last item here, what is your take on stimulants? So, if somebody arrives in their time zone, they're feeling beat down from the change, coffee is an easy go-to to give you a quick upper. I know, you know, modafinil is an option. Oh, also I'll say that when I was in Dubai, we went and did cryotherapy and

Yeah.

That absolutely eliminated my feeling of jet lag for about 3 hours. I felt spry and alert. It was amazing. But you know, the three or four hours passed and I was back in my haze, but it was really efficacious. So what's your take on other things like coffee, caffeine, modafinil, and something like cold therapy?

Yeah. So I think it depends on the timing of day that you land. So if you're landing in the morning of destination, which often happens when you're going, for example, to Europe, then I think stimulants are fine. It's okay to use stimulants in those cases. What you don't want to do is land somewhere in the afternoon or the early evening and, you know, for whatever reason drink coffee or take a stimulant that's going to disrupt your sleep. So you want to make sure that you're giving your body ample time to metabolize that stimulant before destination sleep time, otherwise you're going to make it much harder to go to sleep at the time that you're supposed to be doing, which is just going to make the jet lag actually worse. Cryotherapy is interesting, like cold exposure. There's been some studies on this and it can be really beneficial for multiple days after arriving if you do it in the morning, as sort of like, you know, it releases epinephrine and cortisol and gives you that natural morning boost of cortisol that your body might not be normally giving you because of the jet lag. So I like cold exposure as well. It's just a slightly different mechanism than what you would see with, say, caffeine or modafinil.

You know, I think next time I travel internationally, I'm going to try that. I'm going to see if I can do cold therapy in the morning waking up, and to see if that meaningfully changes.

Yeah, you could maybe just do like an ice face dunk, or a cold shower would be fine, too. It doesn't need to be really complicated. It doesn't need to be cryotherapy necessarily. You could just jump in the shower, take a cold shower, and that's probably enough to release enough cortisol to give you the symptoms that you're looking for.

Cool. I love this discussion so much and I hope it's useful for people. Here's what I'm taking away. I walked into this discussion today, one, missing Kate. I hope she's okay.

Two is, you know, really I wanted to map out an instruction manual of what people could do to minimize jet lag, because that's what people are asking. And instead we went down the path and we said actually you probably shouldn't travel as much internationally as you're currently doing or imagine you're capable of doing, because the damage is really significant and that trade-off is actually hurting you and your loved ones and your co-workers and your investors and everyone around you. You think you're being a hero, but it's actually really damaging everyone. And so there's actually a reasonable expectation that people could have of each other that there is such a thing as too much international travel, where it becomes damaging for everybody in that equation. And if you have a rule of thumb and that shared expectation that we talked about, whether you're 3 to four days per month or per 60 days or per 90 days, it's a decent rule of thumb to think about health.

And I think honestly this is the biggest value. But I haven't heard anybody ever say there's such a thing as too much international travel, right? It's like when you are going hard, it's like just breathe through it. Just hammer away. So I like this a lot. What's your take?

I love it. I love that we came in here. We recognize that every single one of these studies, while there's literature to suggest that some of these things we're talking about have benefit, it's marginal, right? It's a 15% improvement. It's a 50% improvement. But nowhere is there an intervention or a combination of interventions that are going to resolve jet lag. It is still going to be a thing. And we're going to have to decide as a culture whether we're going to tolerate it at the level that we're currently tolerating it or whether we're going to change.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing that struck with me the very most is in that 11 days where I was on purpose getting less sleep, we were doing this experiment, I literally became a different person. The way I thought, what I wanted, what I imagined, my willpower, my discipline, my mood, how much optimism I felt relative to pessimism, it just literally changed me as a human in just 11 days. That's pretty scary, you know. I've been so consistent in my routines and my thought patterns have also been very stable, and that just threw me out of whack, and it's actually really alarming. So, I'm glad that I actually have that experience to feel it so acutely.

And now when I talk to people, I can come from a place of deep understanding of where they're at. They are in that state I was in, they don't know it. So they're in what I would consider to be an absolute emergency state and they're kind of like, honestly, pretty good. I think I'm just fine with it, right? I think my body handles it really well. It's like, no, this is not, you're not doing well. Your body's not doing well. This is not a good situation.

Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, you're sitting here saying I'm a completely different person. Kate's so sick she's not even on this podcast. Two completely different experiences of travel. Yeah.

Yeah. That actually is the best point, is we sadly lost Kate's presence because the damage that she sustained overwhelmed her body. And, you know, I was close. We both got sick. We could feel it. We both had a little tickle in our throats. And then we went to another conference yesterday and we stayed up late again for this one, and I think that put her over the edge. I got a nap in the day, which I think got me. So today I'm feeling pretty good, but a teeny bit of sickness. So hopefully Kate will be back. But she made the comment to me this morning that it's possible that people in the future will look back at us and our disposition towards getting sick was so lax, when really when you get sick it's really causing a lot of damage in the body. And so just like we're always trying to imagine what future generations will see so clearly which we're blinded to, that could be one.

Yeah. Not only did they eat bags of chips, but they traveled across multiple time zones and continued to work when they were sick. And yeah, the list goes on and on about the ways that we treat ourselves.

Yeah. Cool. Well, I feel great about this. I'm personally, honestly, going to go out now and, when I talk to people, I zero in on a few things like sleep and exercise. I'm now going to focus a lot more on travel. This has not been part of my questionnaire, like how are you doing? What is your travel schedule? How many time zones are you flipping through each month? So, this is really helpful for me.

That's great. That's great. Well, thanks, Bryan. This has been awesome.

Yeah, it's been great. Okay, guys. So thanks for hanging with us today. Hopefully you change your travel routine to have this in mind and it will make you a better person in life. Be well.

This is the Bryan Johnson podcast. Special thanks to my co-hosts Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin. For more science breakdowns and protocols, subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow the podcast on your favorite platform, or follow me on Instagram or X, Bryan

Article published September 26, 2026