#051 - Making Sense of Sleep Duration Monitoring

In this episode of the Adam Ringler Show, I'm discussing a recent tweet of mine sharing a snippet of "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by Dr. Matthew Walker. Are we, sport scientists, actively monitoring sleep durations and qualities in our student-athletes to only measure it or should we actually derive meaningful and actionable information from the subjective recall? I believe the later but recognize that sleep is an unbelievably challenging element to actively control.

Who is the author of this book? Matthew Walker is a British scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease.

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Key Takeaways

• Sport scientists monitoring sleep duration and quality should ask whether they are deriving meaningful, actionable information or just measuring for the sake of it.
• Sleep is an unbelievably challenging element to actively control in student-athletes, even when the data is clear.
• The episode draws on "Why We Sleep" by Dr. Matthew Walker, a British scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on sleep's impact on human health and disease.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. Hey everybody, it is Adam. I want to remind you of one thing, rather than spamming this show with herbal tea advertisements or, you know, performance technology companies coming on and trying to sell their latest gizmos, I have opted not to have an advertisement over the last, probably 20 shows or so, 20, 25

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[00:01:28] Check it out at admringler.com, forward slash newsletter. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. This was a fun show to get my ideas, my thoughts out of my head and it centers around making sure that we as practitioners are always advocating for sleep and it centers also around a tweet that I recently put out over the last couple of days where I essentially quoted out of Dr. Matthew Walker's why we sleep book that 10 consecutive days of sleeping at

[00:02:03] Seven hours a night is the almost the same reaction times or accuracy rates when it comes to a day without sleep and it just shows how important sleep really is. Should I go on and over the course of the next 15 or so minutes, I share my thoughts about why this is important, why A, the book is also a really great book, but B, why we need to continue to advocate for our student athletes to get more sleep. You don't want to miss this show, check it out.

[00:02:35] Hey, everybody, this is your host, Adam Ringler, and welcome to the decoding excellence show, the Adam Ringler show. And today I want to discuss a couple things that I continue to see pop up on social media. And one of the things that have created, I don't know if it's controversy by any means, but there was a tweet that I ended up saying.

[00:02:58] And a lot of this was centered around a book that I read called Why We Sleep. And it's by Dr. Matthew Walker, I've yet to have them on the show. I really want to invite him, I have yet to do so. I had another sleep expert, Nick Littlehaos on a show a long time ago. And of this tweet that was sent out, it was essentially based on this book and based on some of the research studies within the book, it talked about how 10 consecutive days of

[00:03:29] Seven hours of sleep and pairs you as much as going a four day without sleep. And yes, this is sort of a click baby, if you will, right? Because a lot of us strive to even get seven hours of sleep. And I think the common notion is if you're getting less than six hours of sleep, you might be sleeping paired, right? But within this book and the author, Dr. Walker, goes on to talk a lot about sleep.

[00:03:57] Obviously, it's a huge thorough book that talks extensively about why we need it, the history of it, the biochemical properties that exist when we do get sleep, but nonetheless about it. It's to athletic performance, right? Nobody within the realm of sports performance would ever negate that sleep is important, right? We preach this often, so time and time and time again, about the importance of getting

[00:04:24] Sleep as it relates to things like Sherry Moss work, when it comes to reaction time and repeat, repeat sprint ability, efficiency, things like that, but also when it comes to recovery, when it comes to muscular soreness, when it comes to the actual cascade of effects that happen in the human body when a person does sleep and how it's restorative and healing. But so nobody, I think, refutes that sleep is important. I think the controversy then becomes around, well, how much sleep is actually really needed.

[00:04:59] And this is where we've had some conversations online about, hey, you know, like what happens if, you know, if instead of seven hours of sleep weapons, if, you know, an athlete's only getting six or five, but weapons if they're getting consecutively more sleep than what they've done the nights before is that pad. And my thought process when I was, you know, dissecting this a little bit is that, you know, eight hours of sleep is better than seven, it's better than six is better than five,

[00:05:29] Right? And the idea for us is to really understand that we need to try to control the controllables. And what I mean by that is that sleep is one of those behavioral, environmental factors, conditions that we as practitioners have very little control or ability to alter an intervener, unless the participant, in this case, the athlete, is really willing to make the changes, right?

[00:05:57] We can't create the conditions that might improve sleep if they're unwilling to actually adopt the behaviors to do so as well. So we can do subtle things, right? And let's just say historically, if we've had a training session at 6am every morning, then obviously by moving that back later in the day, that would allow athletes to wake up later in the morning and subsequently get more hours of sleep, most likely, right?

[00:06:23] Let's not be naive and think that athletes, you know, student athletes in particular don't have academic responsibilities as well that we need to account for. So, you know, rather than just a professional athlete or just a general professional, and we will not even talk about the athletic world, right? When you leave your nine to five work, in most cases, professionals can leave that at work and go home and enjoy family life and have dinner and go to bed or whatever, right?

[00:06:51] Student athletes carry this additional burden that they are then also responsible for carrying an academic load, and that homework and projects and papers and term papers and midterms and final exams follow them and they need to continue to study on these things respectfully. So why I say that is because, you know, we can't always modify the amount of, you know, academic work that they have based on their majors and the curriculum of their classes. And we can't modify things like, you know, are they going to actually adopt, you know,

[00:07:22] Proper sleep hygiene when it comes to, you know, blue-light blocking glasses and dim lights and creating the environmental conditions around their home to actually promote a better sleep hygiene, better sleep duration and quality of sleep. So how do we actually modify those things? And this is where I think when we come and we start to discuss, you know, things like sleep monitoring, it's often a futile attempt to try to measure something that we have very little

[00:07:56] Modifiable ways of affecting the behavior and the environment in the first place. And so unless these athletes and these student athletes or professional athletes or whatever want to adopt a healthier sleep hygiene, then at that point in time, then we can actually have an intervention. We can help create the conditions, we can help educate and we can do what we do as professionals to help modify the situation, right?

[00:08:23] But continuing to monitor an athlete's only sleeping six hours one day and six and a half hours another day and five and a half hours the third day, we can talk about sleep hygiene until we're blue in the face. But if they don't want to actually change the conditions and change the behaviors, then we're measuring something just to measure it. And part of what I see so often within sports science is that we measure things that are

[00:08:44] Easy to measure because, you know, it's another data source and it's another data aggregation that we can pull in, whether it's into an athlete management system or elsewhere. But you know, the idea of using data is to make data driven informed decisions and to make modifiable decisions to positively affect sport performance. And you know, so maybe at some level, just monitoring in a very acute sort of setting sleep and then providing an educational setting might be the aha moment when athlete needs

[00:09:19] To change that behavior because perhaps there is truly an educational barrier to adapting, you know, proper sleep hygiene for that manner. But if they knows the sleep hygiene and the behavior is necessary to actually promote positive sleep and positive sleep hygiene, then it's ultimately up to them, right, to adopt those things. So I often have, you know, one of my responses is that, you know, it's just a tough environmental

[00:09:46] Behaviorable factor to manipulate. But at the same time, I also think that most athletes don't really know what their bodies should feel like or what good sleep should feel like, right? And it reminds me of this very famous poem, I know this sounds weird, but, you know, hang with me, called This Is Water. And This Is Water is a David Foster Wallace, I think it's an essay, perhaps, or maybe

[00:10:17] It was a commencement speech, I forget the actual, yeah, it was a 2005 commencement speech to a college. And in this, he starts talking about it, but he uses the analogy that it's like two fish or, you know, a group of fish swimming past another group of fish. And one group of fish says, hey, you know, how's the water, boys? And in the second pane of this sort of mental cartoon is that, you know, the fish sort

[00:10:45] Of blankingly stare back to the first group to ask him that question. And then they respond later with what the hell is water? And that's how I feel like with sleep. So when we, as practitioners, end up saying, hey, you know, like, this is how your body should feel, it should feel great, it should feel like you need to be getting, you know, in a half, nine hours of sleep because your body's optimally functioning at an optimal

[00:11:08] Level, that a lot of these guys are like, hey, I feel fine, if you're just fine. And it's that, yeah, sure, you probably feel fine, but you don't know when you're in a sleep deprived state, you're not in the best position to properly assess your sleep deprivation. And if that's the case, then it's like the analogy of somebody who has been drinking too much, right? They are in a poor state, cognitively and physically to assess how much they've been drinking.

[00:11:39] In the same way that if you're in a sleep deprived state, you're a poor assessment of how actual sleep deprived are you? So, you know, you might be operating in three or four of the cylinders, but perhaps you can, you can push even further, perhaps you have, you know, a lot more athletic potential to actually give that they otherwise wouldn't have ever been tapped into. So that was one of my thought processes, as far as some of the conversations that we've

[00:12:10] Been having, you know, with other practitioners in the field centered around sleep. I then go into, and you know, I talked about a couple other articles I think I linked to a Pacey performance podcast, I think it was episode 133 with Sherry Mann, who comes on and talks a little bit about her research. I also ended up linking, and you can find this all on our Twitter at Adam Ringler, but I also linked to one of my favorite podcasts as well, The Kevin Rose Show, where Dr. Matthew

[00:12:42] Walker, who, like I said earlier in the show, the author of The Why We Sleep on Locking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, came on and talked a lot about his research in that book. And I think I also, and lastly here, I linked to the Nick Littlehill's episode, where he talked about the R90 sleep system that he has, and he talks about the book that he has put on, which I think is called Sleep, pretty easy right there, but the R90 sleep program. So he goes on and talks a little bit about that as well.

[00:13:17] So I just wanted to pop on the show and share this because I think there's been a lot of conversation surrounding sleep. And I think it's invoked right now for people to be like, oh, well, hey, you know, like we would never be able to get nine hours of sleep, or eight hours of sleep, and we should be focusing rather on what can we do in a sub-optimal level of sleep. And I agree, I think we should, but we should also not attempt to try to pick the low-hanging

[00:13:47] Fruit, i.e. What can we try to change or modify or how can we help the environmental conditions that lead to poor sleep? How do we change those things? And then we should always be advocating for people to get sleep and to be trying to prioritize their sleep. You know, that's been something that I've, you know, I'm looking at the start of a new

[00:14:09] Semester, sort of a new year here, where we shift, I essentially shift a lot of my later afternoon responsibilities to the early morning, just because of scheduling. And because of that, I'm looking at what modifiable things do I need to do to make sure that I can be prepared, as a parent, a parent of two young children, six and four, what do I need to do to make sure that I'm in a position where I can get to bed, aren't time, to make sure that I'm my very best when I'm out there on the floor coaching the athletes, right?

[00:14:40] So if I'm going to prioritize sleep in front of my athletes, I need to first prioritize it with me, because if I'm not my very best, then it's going to be very challenging for them to be as well. Hey, everybody, thanks for tuning in to this show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right?

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