Jet Lag Going East, Jet Lag Going West

There is an enormous amount written about jet lag and almost all of it is about daylight, meal times and what to do on the plane. None of that is our department and you can find it anywhere. What is rarely written down is the part that matters once you are already standing in a room in Amsterdam with a body on the wrong clock: which hours are actually available to you, and which format suits the state you are in rather than the state you would prefer.

It begins with a question people rarely ask themselves. Did you fly east to get here, or west.

Flying east: wired at midnight, wrecked at eight

If you arrived from the Americas, you flew east, and your internal clock is running behind the one beside the bed. Local evening feels like your afternoon. You are not remotely ready to sleep at eleven, and at one in the morning you are still not. Then local morning arrives at what your body insists is the middle of the night, and that is the part that hurts.

The practical consequence is that the hours you would normally consider unbookable are the ones you are most awake for. Midnight to two in the morning is not a compromise for an eastbound arrival; it is the natural window. We run through the night with 45 therapists on the roster, so those hours are genuinely available rather than theoretically available, and there is no night surcharge inside the ring — a one o’clock booking is priced exactly like a one o’clock afternoon.

For state rather than schedule: eastbound arrivals are usually alert and unable to settle, which is the case for something slow. Tantra is breath-led and deliberately unhurried, and ninety minutes is its floor rather than its generous version. An hour of it ends before it has arrived anywhere.

Flying west: asleep at nine, awake at three

Arriving from Asia or the Gulf means you flew west, and your clock is ahead of the local one. The evening ambushes you. You are unconscious by half past nine whether or not you meant to be, and then you are entirely awake at three in the morning with the whole building silent and nothing to do about it.

Westbound arrivals have two viable windows and they sit at opposite ends. The early evening, before the crash, is one: book for seven or eight rather than ten, and accept that ten is not going to happen. The other is that three a.m. window, which is a real hour on this roster and one of the easier ones to fill at short notice precisely because so few people think to ask for it. Confirmation still takes about ten minutes at three in the morning, and payment is still on arrival — cash in any major currency at the day’s rate, card, or crypto.

For state: a westbound arrival at three is usually stiff, cold and only partly awake, which suits warm and physical rather than slow and internal. Oil work or body-to-body both do better with that body than anything asking for concentration.

The mistake both directions make

Booking for the hour you wish you were on rather than the hour you are on. An eastbound traveller books for ten in the evening because ten in the evening is when a sensible person books a massage, and spends the whole booking not yet tired and afterwards lies awake until four. A westbound traveller books for ten as well, and is asleep before the knock. In both cases the booking was made by the calendar rather than the body.

The hours are the flexible part. Twenty-four hours a day is not a slogan on this site; it is the reason the awkward end of the clock is bookable at all. Adjust the hour to the direction you flew and everything else — duration, format, price — behaves normally. The ladder does not change at night, and a room out by the runway is arranged rather than assumed if that is where the wrong clock has left you.