Night night

Eric Meyer reveals his “Sooper-Dooper No-Patent-Pending DIY Anti-Jet-Lag Technique”. Not a lot to it; arrange matters so that you get your customary amount of sleep and wake at the time you would normally wake shifted to your destination's time zone. But Eric refuses to use melatonin. Why, I wonder. He says because it doesn’t work for him, and that’s fair enough. But I find that a version of Eric’s technique plus 3 mg of melatonin about half an hour before I want to sleep works better for me.

Of course, I can’t prove it is the melatonin. All I know is that I get a better night’s sleep, especially flying east, when I have swallowed one. What I really need, of course, is for someone secretly to replace my stash with placebo pills. But actually, I don’t. Because I don't care whether it really is the melatonin that helps me nod off, just as long as I continue to believe it is.