You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Still Play Your Best With Jet Lag - #70

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam talk strategies for performing while suffering from jet lag. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to tell you how to still play your best even when you have jet lag. Man, if you have this figured out, this would be good for me. I'm not, I'm just going to sit. All right, Peter fell asleep. No, I mean, you're probably still legit jet lag right now.

Yeah, I return from overseas yesterday. So this is a very topical content that I can barely even get through right now. Excellent. Okay. So this is, I think, is, you know, We try to give a little bit of utility on this you'll hear a podcast. We give a little bit of humor. We give a little bit of actionable advice.

We like to set the bar low, a little bit of quite a few things. And if, you know, the price of entry is free. Yeah, what are you going to do? Yeah. But I think this one actually, you know, we talk about what recordings to listen to, how to practice. All those things are important. But, you know, the reality, if you do any kind of international touring or travel is it's going to come to a time when you have to play. play when you have jet lag

or to do something or to get something accomplished. And so no matter what you have prepared in terms of your musicality and your concentration and all that, it'll all be for naught, I would say, did I use that properly? Not? You did. That sounded funny, but there you go. It sounded very British. I was just in London, I might add. Yeah, yeah. But it would all be for naught

if you can't get over or at least deal with the jet lag. It's definitely a skill that needs to be developed. I'll never forget the first time I played in Japan. I didn't know what I was going to do. I mean, I'd never gone that far west before and then had to play that night. Which is weird, because they call it the Far East. I've never understood that. I don't either.

But, I mean, I was a wreck. Yeah. I was a wreck. Yeah. So, in other words, you had not learned about drugs yet at that point. I had not learned about drugs. Okay. Trying to go all natural.

Didn't work. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we're just going to kind of, you know, free ball on some, some just different ideas that we have and see what comes up. But, you know, the one that I've developed that actually works the best is going to seem really obvious. That's get some sleep. Oh, come on. No, okay, but this is the thing.

This is the normal schedule. And I've done this a number of different ways. But, you know, if you have a gig that evening and you're traveling to, say, anywhere in Europe or UK. So if you're leaving the United States, you're pretty much going to be flying most likely overnight because almost all the flights go. So you're going to get somewhere from very early, more. morning to kind of mid morning to maybe around nude. So if the gig is that evening, like normally what I'll do is fly in the day before and most promoters and tour managers will set it up that way because it's just oppressive

to get in and then if you're delayed, you're going to be going straight to the gig. So if you get in the day before, a lot of people are like, oh, you've got to try to stay up until that night so you can reset your clock. But I've found that just like when you're tired, grab the sleep because that's a luxury to have the day off. I've also probably going on half the time just due to scheduling, arrive the morning and had to do a gig the same night, so you don't necessarily have that much flexibility. But even in that case, get some sleep whenever you can and get it on a bed.

Yeah. Now, that's a great point, actually. You don't want to try to stay up too late and then not be able to sleep. Right. Then you're totally screwed. This is what I'm saying with Japan. What happened to me in Japan is like, I was like, no, I'll try to reset my clock. No.

Nope. Didn't happen. Exactly. And I mean, the whole thing is like, we're talking about how you can play your best with Jetlag. Like, if the gig, you know, if you've got a two-hour gig or one hour gig or two-and-a-half-hour gig, You just need to be at your mental best that you can be during that time. You'll eventually reset your clock. I mean, you start to see when the sun is coming and going.

And look, you may end up, if you get in and then you sleep all day and then you wake up and you feel sort of refreshed and you do the gig, you might be up all night. Yeah. And then you're going to be screwed the next morning, but you probably don't have to do a gig until the next night again. So you just have to grab the sleep. I mean, the whole thing of resetting your clock, that's if you're arriving back home and you need to like readjust to your family or some kind of nine to five job. That's a different thing. but we have to be on the schedule of being as alert as we can for the gig. That's what we're there for.

Yeah. Something that helped me eventually, and it doesn't really matter how you go about this, I use meditation, but to find a way to relax if you can't sleep, if you haven't got enough sleep before the gig, a couple hours before the gig, you know, for me discovering just simple ways to meditate, to be quiet, to relax my mind, to try to, like, stop my thoughts, really help me on the gig later, whether that's just like, even if you can't sleep, just laying down and closing your eyes or, you know, going for a run can help too.

But something to kind of get your mind off the fact that you're tired. Right, right. And, you know, yeah, and I think that even if you sleep quite a bit on the plane, and I mean, I'm lucky that I'm able to sleep a lot on planes, it's not the same quality. I mean, I put it at about two to one ratio is what I find. So if I'm on a nine, 10 hour flight and I sleep, you know, six, seven hours, that's pretty good, eight hours, but it's about four hours of quality sleep. That's right.

So even if I get in and I'm like, wow, I'm feeling good. I'm excited. I'm going to go out and side see. I might do a little bit of that, but I'm like, make sure and get that nap in before the gig so that I'm feeling refreshed. Yeah, I'll probably be up half, you know, at 3 a.m., but I'll kind of reset slower and not put that pressure on myself. Totally. Now, one thing with the, you know, it's always hardest at the beginning of the tour. So especially like for Japan or somewhere from like, like we're in the Midwest. So we're going, you go to Japan, China. It's some of the worst because you're 12 to 13 hours. You're exactly opposite. So a lot of times, you know, it's like going earlier day. But that can be hard because you're off and stuff. So sometimes I will, like the whole thing of arriving on the day of the gig, if you can get in early and get a little bit of sleep on the plane, get in early and just sleep as much as you need to during the day. Sometimes for me that's even easier than arriving the day before. So if I'm feeling secure about the flight and that it's going to go through and everything

and I'm not going to be late, sometimes I'll actually opt for that and have better success. And then you know you're not going to sleep too long because you've got to get up for sound checking gig, do the gig. You're going to be tired at the end. And then you might just kind of get lucky and go to sleep about midnight and be kind of reset and set up for a nice little tour. Yeah. I also found that actually being on the gig then on the concert,

you can experiment with kind of ways to perk yourself up on the gig. Sometimes what would help me is to like going really hard at first. You know what I mean? Like my first solo. Like I'll just start seeing what I can do. And then I have like a grasp of like, oh, okay, I'll be okay. Or I'm like, okay, I need to slow my roll here a little bit. Slow you roll.

Yeah. Or sometimes I would start, I would kind of pace myself a little bit and just like resign the fact that I, my mind isn't quite as sharp as I need it to be right now. Yeah. And just, you know, be okay with that and be simpler. I mean, it's not a bad idea in general, to be honest. Yeah, yeah. To just play simply, you're going to be fine. Right. Right.

Yeah. And I think, you know, a nice thing too is, is it's always disorienting when you're traveling far. And it's kind of, you know, you're fighting. Jet lag is sort of your body fighting against war. what is kind of set up to protect itself by being in rhythm with the sun and the moon and the night and the day and your regular schedule and you're throwing that off in a real violent way. So, you know, kind of save up your mental energy. And I think, you know, I like your idea about meditation.

I'm going to definitely try and apply that, you know, in my future travels too because, you know, that's all about kind of recharging our mental energy and focusing it on the performance, you know. And I just find, like, you know, what's become easier. It's not necessarily that the jet lag has gotten easier. but training my brain as to when I in preparation for when it needs to be at its most focus for me to be able to deliver on what I'm there to do has become a little bit easier and so you know I'm I'm pulling back on that mental that mental energy like for instance that I would spend on like a deep conversation with someone even during that day I'm like I don't I don't have

the mental capacity for I mean I do have it but I want to save that for later when I really need to concentrate on the gig and if you start to train your mind in that way it's amazing what it will reward you with. So let's see. Do we have anything else on this? I mean, we could get into the drugs things. I've actually tried some of those,

I mean, like the minor stuff, melatonin, which really never, I mean, it was fun and I felt cool with the bottle of it. And like there's all sorts of labels on it

that are like, this is not approved for anything, but having fun with and it's herbal, I guess and stuff. But I do know people that they're like, oh, it's great.

It helps you reset your clock. Yeah, I mean, I've taken Ambien, but more when I get home because I get a little zombie, It definitely works.

I mean, it makes you sleep. But again, like, that's more if you are just, like, hell-bent on, like, I want to reset right away. I have done that when I've come home from, like, Asia, and it just felt like I'm, because I got to, you know, work on a regular schedule. Right. And it does help with that. But there's some side effects. I mean, nothing that was horrible for me.

Yeah, I don't like to mess with it right before I'm going to play, like the day before. Oh, yeah, definitely not before you play. I think it's more of a just, you got to sleep and you don't want to wake up at 2 a.m. That's good. It's good. You know, we're not doctors. So, so do it. What's the disclaimer we need to put on this?

We don't even play one on... We don't even play them on the radio. My name is not Peter Martin, and this is not. Adam Manus. But... Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. You can go to you'll hearat.com to get more information, submit a question, or just say hello. Wait, you can do that.

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