DTNS Weekend - The Science Behind the App That Beats Jet Lag

**Tom Merritt** (0:09)
Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition, gratefully provided to you, and thanks for your support of this show. We go into topics a little in depth. And I just got back from a lot of travel across a lot of time zones.
And I am not jet lagged, even though I'm just more than 24 hours after having traveled to Japan, traveled back from Japan. And it's thanks in large part to Dr. Niki and her recommendation of the TimeShifter app. So I thought, why not we sit down with Dr. Niki and talk about this app and figure out why it might work? Is it just my imagination? Did I hypnotize myself into not having jet lag? Is there science behind it?

**Nicole Ackermans** (0:56)
I just talked you through it, really.

**Tom Merritt** (0:58)
Where did you hear about this? Because you recommended it to me, and then I mentioned it to Eileen, and she's like, oh, I have a friend who lives in Canada, and she has to travel to China because she has family there all the time, and she swears by it. She's like, I never get jet lag because I use TimeShifter.

**Nicole Ackermans** (1:13)
Yeah, so back in 2023, I had a conference in Australia, and it was my first trip to Australia, and I needed to, like the day after I got there, speak at the conference. So I was like, I need to optimize as much as possible so I don't get jet lag, and I looked up like all the, sometimes I, you know, for a researcher, sometimes I research a little too much, but I did a deep dive. I think it was probably on Reddit or something, but it was like, yeah, wear the compression socks, do the mask, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of people recommended this app over and over. So I was like, it can't hurt, you know, it's just an app. And you can get the first few uses for free, which is how you get me, is to make me not pay for the app. I'm so cheap.
And it worked super well. And so I just recommended to everyone after that.

**Tom Merritt** (1:58)
You get one trip, round trip for free, then you have to pay for it.

**Nicole Ackermans** (2:04)
Per email.

**Tom Merritt** (2:04)
And so, well, yeah, exactly. As long as they don't know it's new, you can get a second one for free.
And I saw that and I was like, you know what? I'm not gonna use it for Europe. I'll just look at what they say to do and kind of follow it. And I did that and maybe it helped a little, but I was pretty, I was still, I still had jet lag. I went to Japan, which is much farther, much bigger time zone shift. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna burn my free one on this email address. I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna see how it works. And I did. And I wasn't able to follow it 100%.
But it mostly worked.

**Nicole Ackermans** (2:46)
It's also relatively easy to follow. It's not making you do backflips or anything. Yeah.

**Tom Merritt** (2:50)
And in fact, I have some tips on which parts to pay the most attention to based on my own experience.
But let's actually do our due diligence here. You looked into this app to find out like, is this just one of those things where because the app is telling you to do certain things, you, you, you know, convince yourself you don't have jet lag or is there actual, is there actually something behind it? What did you find out?

**Nicole Ackermans** (3:17)
Yeah, and another reason why I kind of stuck with this is I traveled to Europe a lot to visit my family and the sanity that you gain by not having a week of jet lag is so, is such a big difference that it's like important. But yeah, so I looked into this and like, is it an AI? Is it whatever? So first, I kind of did some digging. The founder is Dr. Stephen Lockley and I looked at his Google scholar page and he is a very active researcher in sleep science and has done a lot of work.
A lot of this app focuses on light and circadian rhythm and he has a lot of like foundational work in that field. So this is not just like a guy who started a startup.

**Tom Merritt** (3:54)
Like he didn't just call himself doctor. He's literally one of the foremost research scientists in the field, it sounds like.

**Nicole Ackermans** (4:02)