6 Things You Didn’t Know About Jet Lag

We've all been there: You're fresh off a flight to your summer getaway and psyched to make the most out of your trip — and you're suddenly hit with incapacitating exhaustion. Forget squeezing in some first-day sightseeing, you're lucky if you can get out of the cocoon of your hotel bed.

While we might love traveling, we can all agree that there are some aspects of the actual process of getting from point A point B that are kind of a bummer — namely, jet lag.

Jet lag is what happens when your body's circadian rhythm (or internal clock) gets thrown out of whack thanks to a rapid trip through multiple time zones. This can leave you feeling exhausted when you want to be awake (and vice versa) and it often takes a few days for your body to re-adjust to the new schedule of sunrises and sunsets you find yourself in.

There's not much you can do to totally skip jet lag, but there are some seemingly innocuous parts of your flying ritual that can make it worse. Ahead, we cover a few things you probably didn't know about jet lag.