This is Your Brain on Business Travel

Like many business leaders, professional baseball umpires have a unique set of mental skills that combines experience, focus and razor-sharp judgment.

Like many business leaders, umpires can make or break their reputations based on the speed and accuracy of their decisions, which are often made under intense pressure and scrutiny.

And like many business leaders, umps spend a lot of time on the road, often spending weeks bouncing between hotels, airports and taxi stands far from home.

This last point is highly germane to the first two.

A recent study published in the Academy of Management Discoveries untangles the complex ways in which travel can affect cognitive performance. Reviewing the decisions of Major League Baseball umpires during more than 20,000 games played over nearly 10 years, researchers set out to quantify the effects that trans-meridian travel (that is, movement across time zones) on judgment and accuracy.

While the degree and scope of cognitive impairment varied (depending on age, experience and other factors), the study highlighted an important contributor to the overall mental sharpness of umps: The fact that they plan for the toll travel takes on them. In fact, many have teams of medical and sport science experts working to manage the impact of jet-setting on their bodies and their minds. “When people ask me about the travel involved in umpiring, I tell them it was like a second job,” retired pro ump Dale Scott told the researchers. “It was an entirely different job than the stuff on the field.”

Few business professionals approach their time on the road with the same caution and care, says Julian Barling, professor and Borden Chair of Leadership at Smith School of Business, who co-authored commentary on the study with Haskayne School of Business’s Nick Turner, MSc’98, and who co-wrote a forthcoming book on leaders’ mental health with clinical psychologist Simon Rego. In fact, most underestimate the cognitive and behavioural effects of business travel. “Business leaders tend to be the kinds of people who we think of as more resilient and healthy. They often have resources and opportunities to maintain their well-being, and their status conveys a sort of shield,” Barling explains. “But it turns out that jet lag is sufficient to puncture that shield.”

Here’s the “plane” truth: Whether you’re a regular road warrior or occasionally rally for a red eye, travelling across time zones affects—and often, hinders—your ability to show up at your best. And as experts say failing to mitigate the risks can carry significant personal and professional consequences. 

A real shock to your system

Humans have evolved to operate on the 24-hour schedule that comprises our internal circadian rhythm. When we travel across time zones, the sudden expansion or contraction of our accustomed cycle can wreak havoc on how we move, think and feel. “Jet lag can have very meaningful health effects,” Barling explains. 

Here is a sample of what can happen to your body and mind when you regularly move it back and forth between time zones:

• Physically, business travel can introduce several variables that disrupt an otherwise healthy routine, including less sleep, different food and more alcohol. “When you’re spending night after night in a hotel room, your opportunities for exercise go down, as does your ability to eat healthily,” Barling says. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who log a lot of miles tend to wear the effects in their bodies, via elevated blood pressure, higher stress and weight gain. 

• Emotionally, the combination of schedule interruptions and unfamiliar settings can upset the normal equilibrium and trigger unpredictable (and sometimes uncharacteristic) feelings. “It can seriously affect your mood,” Barling says. “You can become more irritable from a lack of sleep.”

• Mentally, the effects of jet lag can sneak up fast and furious. Big trips can diminish alertness and impair concentration. They can compromise productivity and hinder decision-making. They can cloud memory and slow recall. “In the first few days of a trip, especially with jet lag, I notice it’s harder to stay organized and focused,” reports Ninoshka Pais, MMIE ’25, who spends between 90 and 140 days of the year on the road as Founder and CEO of Ninoshka Travels, where she creates content focused on the needs of solo BIPOC female travellers. “Small details can slip.”

Combined, these effects mean jet lag can introduce real risks for professionals, their organizations and the people they do business with. Some of these risks are related to safety, stemming from the mistakes and accidents that stem from disorientation and sleep deprivation. (Renowned Harvard sleep medicine professor Charles A. Czeisler has advised companies to formally ban any employee taking an overnight flight from driving a car to their final destination.)

There’s also the risk of missed opportunity. When reason for the trip you’re taking is consequential—a speaking engagement, a negotiation, a client pitch—being off your game can carry very real business implications. For instance, jet lag can affect your ability to comport yourself with professionalism. “It’s harder to show up and be enthusiastic when you’re so tired. You really have to turn it on,” says Pais. It can also cause you to miss conversational nuances, make unintentional faux pas, and flub key moments, experts say. 

“If you don’t do it right, business travel can really come back to hurt what you are trying to achieve,” says Angela James, director of the Centre for International Management at Smith School of Business, who travels regularly to oversee the school’s partnerships with other institutions around the world. (She recently returned from a work trip to her 56th country: Poland.) “You can’t yield as much from your time on the ground as you should.”

A problem that’s easy to dismiss

Intellectually, these facts make sense. But in practice, the realities of modern capitalism can create pressure to disregard them and just power through.

For busy executives, time is money. If you’ve just spent 14 hours flying from Toronto to Tokyo for an important meeting, you’re probably going to want to get things done as expeditiously as possible. Going straight from the arrivals lounge to a cab to an office tour might feel efficient—optimal, even. That’s dangerous thinking, according to Barling. “You may think you can’t afford any downtime, and that you don’t want to waste a day,” he says. “But are you really at the top of your game? The answer is that you’re probably not, at least in terms of physiology—but you probably don’t recognize it.” 

Ego can feed feelings of invincibility, says Barling. “If you’re a high-status leader, you might look at yourself and think, ‘I would never have risen to this level if I didn’t have what it takes, so what’s a bit of jet lag?’” So too can bravado: While it’s common for professionals to talk up their trips in conversations with colleagues, it’s rare to hear admissions of fatigue or disorientation. The hierarchical nature of many corporate structures can also play a role. Business travellers tend to sit higher on their org charts, and the subordinates who coordinate or accompany their travels don’t always feel empowered to question whether it’s a good idea for their boss to barrel straight from a trans-Atlantic flight into a high-stakes negotiation. “High-status people are less likely to be told by their followers or employees that they’re making mistakes or that their judgment is defective,” Barling points out.

Then there’s the fact that successful professionals are often highly motivated to give ’er, to squeeze the most out of every opportunity. “As businesspeople, our mindset on work trips is often, ‘I need to keep going,’” says Pais. With trips to 33 countries (and counting) under her belt, she’s very familiar with the thought patterns that can lead to overextension. “We want to see and experience everything, and get things done. We figure we can rest when we get home. We don’t realize how exhausting it is going to be. It takes real effort to slow down.”

A plan for better business travel

You may not be able to assemble your own squad of experts to analyze and optimize your travel (like those pro umpires do), but experts say there are clear steps you can take that can lessen the impact of business travel on your body and your brain. Here are some of their recommendations:

• Give yourself buffers: If there’s any wiggle room in your work schedule, vacation time and budget, James says that adding a bit of time for recovery when you arrive at your destination and when you return home can make a huge difference in performance and productivity. “I really encourage people to pad a trip,” she says. “If you push it to be too tight, you might tax yourself so much that your outcomes will be negatively impacted. You might be physically present, but mentally somewhere else.” An added bonus? Buffer days give you time to soak up some local culture, which James says can help build longer-standing relationships with, and understanding of, whomever you’re there to see. 

• Stick to a routine: Experts recommend incorporating as many elements of your normal day-to-day life into your trip as you can. James likes to make daily exercise a priority, even if it’s just a quick walk around a hotel parking lot, while Pais actively seeks out fresh vegetables—which can be surprisingly tough for travellers to find in hotels and conference centres—to cover her usual nutritional bases. 

• Hydrate: The humidity in commercial air cabins is usually below 20 per cent, less than half of a typical indoor room. That, combined with changes to blood circulation during flight, can create serious dehydration, which in turn can amplify fatigue and stress. “If you’re on a business trip, keeping your hydration up keeps your health up,” says James. 

• Accept some FOMO: Part of the appeal of business travel is the opportunity to amend your professional obligations with more fun tourist pursuits. And while no one suggests you deny yourself the best croissant in Paris or the best view in Hong Kong, if you cram every moment that you’re off the clock with sightseeing and attractions, you’ll cut into important recovery time. Pais recommends a “less is more” approach to leisurely extracurriculars while on work trips. “It takes discipline to stay in and do something that makes you feel grounded and calm,” she says. “But I’ve learned how important it is to listen to your body and put yourself first.”

• Prioritize sleep: It can be hard to turn in early when colleagues are out enjoying an exciting city, but it’s worth prioritizing slumber as much as you can. Research is clear about the effects of poor sleep on leadership, Barling says—and it goes far beyond jet lag. (If you struggle with shut-eye at home or on the road, Barling and Rego provide numerous evidenced-based suggestions for improving your sleep in their book.)

• Take it seriously: Finally, don’t discount what your body and mind is experiencing. Even the most confident road warriors can be affected by jet lag, and those who brush it off may be leaving more on the table than they realize. “People tend to overestimate how resilient they are,” Barling says. “They’ll say, ‘I’m experienced, I’m hardy, I’m different.’ But the research just keeps telling us there are significant cognitive, emotional and health effects to business travel, and most of us are not sufficiently aware of them.”