Jet Lag Planner

London to New York Jet Lag: The Easy One You'll Barely Feel

After a run of eastbound trips that leave you useless for a week, London to New York feels close to a gift. This is the direction your body actually enjoys: five time zones west on a daytime flight of about 8 hours, landing in the New York afternoon with almost nothing to do but stay up a few extra hours to a local bedtime. Flying west means your clock delays, drifting later, and it does that far more happily than the earlier shift an eastbound trip demands. The one thing that'll catch you is waking too early for the first few mornings, which is about the most manageable problem jet lag can hand you.

Why west is the kind direction

Left to its own devices, your body clock likes to run a little past 24 hours, so it would always rather have a longer day than a shorter one. Flying west gives it exactly that, a stretched-out day and a later bedtime, and it goes along without much complaint: about an hour and a half a day, against the hour a day it manages going east. Flying east asks for the reverse, and that's where the fight lives. So west is the soft landing you'll be grateful for. Reckon on three or four days to feel completely normal, and fewer if your evenings are bright, against the five the return leg will want. The full why is in Why Flying East Is Harder Than Flying West.

Landing day: stay up and lean into the evening light

You'll touch down in the New York afternoon feeling as though it's already early evening, because to your body it is. Your one real task is to push your bedtime later, and evening light is how you do it, since light in the four hours before your body's low point (the sleepy trough about three hours before your usual wake time) nudges your clock to delay, which is the direction you want. It has to be real daylight, so get outside in the late afternoon rather than trusting a bright room, and aim for a bedtime around 10 or 11 New York time, later than your body is asking for. If the flight has wrung you out and you're flagging, a 20 to 30 minute nap before mid-afternoon won't hurt, but anything longer or later just puts that local bedtime further out of reach. Which way light shifts you is spelled out in Morning Light or Evening Light: Which Way You Shift Your Clock.

The 4am wake-up is coming

For the first few mornings your eyes will spring open at 3 or 4am, because your body is still on London time, where 4am in New York is a perfectly reasonable 9am and it's expecting breakfast. When it happens, keep the lights low and stay off bright screens, because early-morning light does the opposite of what you want here: it lands after your low point (which is sitting near 11pm New York time on night one) and advances your clock, unpicking the delay you spent yesterday building. Save your daylight for the afternoon and evening instead, and each morning that wake-up drifts a little later until it lands somewhere civilised.

The daytime flight and your coffee

Both ends of this one are in daylight, so the temptation to sleep the flight away is a trap; a long mid-air sleep only makes your first New York night harder. A short rest is fine, then stay reasonably awake. Once you're down, use coffee in the New York morning and stop early, because it lingers for hours and an afternoon cup can cost you sleep you won't notice losing until you're up before dawn. Skip the free wine too, since alcohol suppresses your REM early in the night and chops the back half of it into pieces.

The trip home is the hard one

Enjoy this direction while you're in it, because the flight back doesn't play as nicely. New York to London is the eastward red-eye everyone dreads, a shorter flight but a genuinely harder trip, because it asks your clock to advance across a night you mostly hand over to the plane. It deserves planning on its own terms, which is exactly what Jet Lag From New York to London does.

Fun fact

New York sits 5 hours behind London, and Concorde could make the crossing in under three and a half hours. Put those two facts together and it managed a lovely trick on this exact route: leave London mid-morning and you'd land in New York earlier that same morning by the local clock, on the ground before the hour you'd taken off. The five-hour gap that hands everyone else those pre-dawn wake-ups was, for a Concorde passenger, a free morning.

How the Jet Lag Planner handles this

The Jet Lag Planner shows the westbound flight tracking through daylight, then hands you a delay-based plan: evening light on arrival day, a lights-low blackout for the first few mornings, and a coffee cutoff. For a quick two or three-night trip it might simply tell you a 5-hour shift isn't worth fighting, which is the honest call and the same thinking behind When Not to Fight Jet Lag: Short Trips and Small Shifts. Plan the route at jetlagplanner.app/plan?from=LHR&to=JFK.

Sources

General wellness information, not medical advice. Talk to a clinician before changing your schedule if you have a sleep or health condition.

Last reviewed August 5, 2026.

Put this into a plan for your trip

Your exact flights, your day-by-day light and sleep windows.

Plan my trip

Jet Lag Planner

A free tool that shows your flight across daylight and darkness, then builds an honest day-by-day light and sleep plan. No account, and your trip is worked out in your browser rather than on a server.

General wellness information, not medical advice. Talk to a clinician before changing your schedule if you have a sleep or health condition. © 2026 XOR Limited.