What if there was a simple, low-risk, effective, free, well-researched, high-quality,
guaranteed performance-enhancing substance that put you in a good mood, increased
your speed and strength, repaired tissue damage, boosted your immune function,
improved your memory and problem solving abilities and protected you from injury?
Would you run to your local pharmacy or supermarket immediately to buy it? Does it
sound illegal? Could it be too good to be true?
Well, sleep does all this and, even better, it is legal, affordable and readily available.
Unlike a lot of things, it’s not too good to be true.
Despite the recent unforgivable cheating scandal involving the Houston Astros, the
Astros have been on the cutting edge of innovation for some time.
In May 2018, Alex Bregman, third baseman for the Houston Astros, had hit only one
home run all season. Astros teammate Justin Verlander, one of the best pitchers of this
generation, noticed Bregman’s low power and hints of fatigue, and asked how many
hours Bregman had slept the night before.
“Six,” Bregman answered. And his normal amount? “Six,” Bregman, said as well.
Surprised, Verlander quickly told Bregman that he slept at least 10 hours a night and
said Bregman should start getting more hours himself.
“I felt like that’s overdoing it,” Bregman said. “You shouldn’t sleep that much.”
“Then I started sleeping that much and, next thing you know, I hit 30 homers after that.”
With proper sleep now routine, Bregman continued to hit well into the following season.
At the midway point of the 2019 season, Bregman had hit 24 home runs with 59 runs
batted in. He finished the 2019 season with 41 home runs, 112 runs batted in, and a
.296 batting average.
As for Verlander, if doesn’t throw another pitch, he has a strong case for enshrinement
into the Hall of Fame: He is an eight-time All-Star, won the 2011 American League
M.V.P. and two Cy Young Awards, he has pitched three no-hitters and helped the Astros to the 2017 World Series title. Verlander, who had turned 36 at the time, was still slinging fastballs in the mid-90s and enjoying a late-career resurgence with the Astros. At the midpoint of the 2019 season, he had an outstanding earned run average (E.R.A.) of 2.98. and had allowed the fewest walks and hits per inning (0.813 WHIP) among major league starting pitchers for the second straight season. He took the mound as the American League’s starting pitcher in the 2019 All-Star Game in Cleveland.
He regularly gets nearly 50 percent which, according to a 2013 Gallup poll, is more than the average American’s 6.8 hours.
“That’s Verlander: the Tom Brady of baseball,” said Bregman, comparing his teammate
to the New England Patriots quarterback who, with plenty of sleep and a unique diet
and fitness routine, won his sixth Super Bowl title during the 2018 season at the age of
41.
Verlander aims for 10 hours a night. “And if I need more, I’m not afraid to just sleep
more,” he said. Sometimes eight or nine hours leaves him refreshed. Other times he
gets 11 or even 12.
To help him sleep better and longer, Verlander uses blackout blinds or pins the shades
shut. He also puts his cell phone on silent or on airplane mode to avoid distractions. His alarm clock? “Me,” he said.
“I’ve always been good at listening to my body my whole career,” he added later. “I just
kinda do what makes me feel good. That sounds pretty simplistic but when it really
comes down to it I think it’s the best way. Your body will tell you what to do.”
Verlander is also careful about other aspects of his body. He focuses on joint mobility
and recovery rather than lifting weights during the season. He uses the elliptical or
stationary bicycle for cardiovascular exercise to avoid the wear on joints that running
can cause. He only takes anti-inflammatory medication every other day, common for
pitchers, before a start, he said, because he prefers to let his body naturally rid itself of
soreness. He eats whatever he wants as long as it is not processed.
But sleep may be the most important ingredient for peak performance. For professional athletes, quality sleep provides crucial restorative effects and naturally restocks the body’s testosterone and growth hormone, said Neomi Shah, a sleep medicine doctor at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
“It’s a legal way to improve athletic performance,” she said. “And it goes beyond it, too, in terms of better well-being and an ability to make decisions.”
Athletes’ travel schedules and constant time zone changes can make it hard to sleep
that well consistently. Many elite athletes, from Venus Williams and Roger Federer on
the professional tennis tour to the NBA’s LeBron James, have said they sleep at least
10 hours a night. That was several hours more than the average for baseball players.
Baseball’s hectic 162-game schedule presents unique challenges, but there is a
growing focus on sleep across many sports. In baseball, day games that follow a night
game, happen often. After a typical7 p.m. game, players often do not leave the stadium
until 11 p.m. and may struggle to fall asleep for hours because of adrenaline. They then
have to be back at the stadium in the morning for a 1 p.m. game.
Bregman was initially reluctant to sleep more because he thought he would be missing
out on important leisure or practice time. But Bregman, that year’s American League
starting third baseman in the All-Star Game, said he was getting 10 hours of sleep a
night, often from 2 a.m. after night games until noon.
“I feel way better,” Bregman said recently, before laughing. “Today, I’m a little grumpy
because I only got nine. My mom is in town.”
Sleep Research
So, why is it so important that we get sufficient sleep?
Lack of sleep definitely affects your performance the next day, and probably for a longer period of time than you might expect, according to a new study. The study, led by Tim Althoff, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, is thought to be the largest to date to measure the effect of “real-world sleep on performance.”
Two consecutive nights of less than six hours could leave you sluggish for the following six days. Researchers also found that staying up an extra hour, even if followed by a full night’s sleep, is correlated with slower performance the next day. But going to bed an hour earlier than normal has a negligible effect.
“The data set is pretty amazing,” says Jamie Zeitzer, PhD, a co-author of the study and
a Stanford assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “We looked at
more than 30,000 people over 18 months, which came out to more than 3 million nights of sleep analyzed.”
To measure cognitive performance, researchers examined the subjects’ keystroke
speed on a computer and their click interactions on a web search engine. Those results
were correlated with sleep data collected from wearable fitness devices.
As Zeitzer explains, “Searching the web requires your brain to do a few complex tasks:
Figure out what terms to search on, type the query and then process the results to
decide which one to click. Even small differences in the amount of time it would take
you to click on the result are indicative of how rapidly you are processing that
information. The idea is people have slower processing speeds as they get more tired.”
Zeitzer continues, “The web-scale study provides insight into the impact of sleep
deprivation in the real world, where people compensate for lost sleep with extra coffee
and naps, and otherwise adapt to life circumstances that limit pillow time. The findings largely overlap with results from small and controlled lab-scale studies, where
participants are systematically sleep deprived and assessed on standardized tests.”
Results showed that over the first 24 hours, having one insufficient night of sleep is
associated with 1.2 percent slower performance on average keystroke timing. Two
insufficient nights of sleep are 4.8 percent slower compared to two nights with longer
than six hours of sleep each (2.7 percent and 7.3 percent increases for click times
respectively.) The study adds: “These effect estimates took into account any real-world
behavioral compensation such as increased caffeine intake that would help improve
performance after sleep loss.”
Other research has shown that sufficient levels of sleep:
● Improve performance
● Increase learning and skill development
● Enhance speed, reaction times and strength
● Strengthen the immune system
● Prevent injuries
● Improve decision-making, cognitive processing speed, attention span, and
alertness
● Increase in emotion and mood regulation and management
● Maximize creativity, flexibility and spontaneity
● Optimize visual and spatial recognition and recall abilities
By the same token, research studies suggest that sleep deprivation has a detrimental
effect on these same measures.
The benefits increase even more for young, developing teenage athletes. Yet, despite
all of this, athletes (especially teenagers) are likely to arrogantly brag and boast about
how little sleep they get rather than how much.
Athletes in their teens go through an important mental, emotional, and physical
developmental process and often do so against a backdrop of demanding sports,
academic and social schedules, all encroaching on their sleep time.
Additionally, they are more likely to use technology late at night and that their circadian rhythms (body clock) behave differently from those of adults. It is easy to see how they often don’t get anywhere near as much sleep as they need.
Maximum Learning: Time to Download
A key issue for teenage athletes is that during sleep the information about everything
they have been exposed to, what they have learned and what they have done
throughout the day is encoded, transferred and downloaded. The Lifespan Learning and Sleep Laboratory at University College London (UCL) recently studied 48 students in London and found that the more sleep they had, the better their academic results.
When teenagers are also athletes, they need sleep to help the body benefit from the
skills they have learned during training with brain-imaging techniques having shown that sleep plays a crucial role in learning, motor memory and in improving motor
performance.
Immune System Replenishment: Reduce infection
It isn’t just that sleep is beneficial, lack of sleep can be harmful. Teenagers spend much of their time in large groups of people in school or clubs where it is easy for illnesses to spread. Research reported in Sleep Journal last year measured the sleep of 164 people using wrist actigraphy and sleep diaries. It found the less sleep they had, the higher their risk of catching a cold. Those sleeping fewer than five hours a night were four and a half times more likely to develop a cold than those sleeping more than seven hours a night.
Injury Prevention: Cut injury risk
As well as increased illness risk, the Journal of Pediatric Orthopedics in 2014 published a study that found chronic lack of sleep is associated with an increased number of sports injuries in teenage athletes. The researchers surveyed 112 male and female teenage athletes in California and found those who slept less than eight hours a night were 1.7 times more likely to have had an injury compared with those who slept for more than eight hours.
How much sleep do teenage athletes need?
There is no magic formula for how many hours of sleep teenage athletes need, but most experts have suggested it should be around nine hours.
In addition to these body-clock issues, a review in Sleep Medicine a few years ago
found that the use of technology before bed increased physiological arousal and
anxiety, disrupted melatonin production and further delayed the circadian rhythm,
making it much harder to fall asleep. It is also more difficult to fall asleep and stay
asleep if teenage athletes have been drinking coffee or sports drinks during the day.
An Action Plan
So how do we help teenage athletes get enough sleep? In the US, a few schools have
experimented by moving back the start of the school day. Researchers spent six years
tracking the impact of this and found improvements in punctuality, attendance, alertness and performance.
However, moving a school schedule is difficult for most. Instead, some suggest using
light therapy to adapt the teenage circadian rhythm to adult timing. Others have
experimented with using daytime naps to increase the amount of sleep taken and all
scientists agree that a technology break of at least an hour before bed will help.
There’s proof that such changes could really benefit performance. When Stanford
University swimming team coaches set their swimmers a goal of spending 10 hours in
bed each night, their speeds, reaction times, tumble turn times and kick times all
improved. So, if changes can be made, teenagers may well be snoozing their way to
success.
Sleep tips for athletes
● Take a break from using technology an hour before bed or download an app
which dulls the blue light.
● It is very difficult to sleep before competition. This is normal and your competitors
will be in the same boat, so stay calm about it. Getting enough sleep on other
nights is what matters. Make sure you get a good night’s sleep two nights before
a big competition.
● If you are struggling to sleep, don't be tempted to get up. Rest is not as good as
sleep but it is better than nothing. And you will often fall back to sleep.
● To get out of sleep-debt, increase your time in bed by 15 minutes each night. Or
take power naps of 15-20 minutes during the day. If you often struggle to fall
asleep, learn a mindfulness/meditation/relaxation technique or try yoga exercises
as part of your bedtime routine.
The Secrets of the Navy SEALS
While sports and performance psychology has much to say about conditioning your
mental core, perhaps no organization is more well-known for its approach to success,
mental fitness, and survival than the military of the United States of America,
Particularly, the Navy SEALS.
In 2009, as a response to increasing incidents of post-traumatic stress syndrome,
suicide, and depression in the military, the US military command announced plans to
have all 1.1 million U.S. troops trained in emotional resiliency and stress
management.
The new training was planned to be taught in weekly 90-minute classes led by
sergeants trained in mental techniques that focus on faulty cognitions. These faulty cognitions are thought to lead to emotional difficulties such as anxiety and frustration
under stress. The training included techniques incorporated through the consultation of Dr. Martin Seligman, a leading psychologist in the area of mental conditioning and
stress management. The techniques were based on the work of Dr. Albert Ellis and Dr.
Aaron Beck, who worked in clinical settings to help people to understand and change
their self-talk to improve their emotional functioning.
Until the 1990s, the United States Navy had physically trained the Navy SEALs for
mission success and survival, but mental training was only a byproduct of the
physical training, an afterthought.
However, since the 1990s the Navy realized that they needed to be more purposeful in
their mental conditioning to ensure greater success. To this end, the SEALs met
regularly with sports psychologists and other experts to determine the most essential
elements of mental conditioning and have determined that the following four principles greatly improve the likelihood of mission success and survival:
Set manageable goals. There is much danger in setting too many goals or setting
unrealistic goals that impede progress or success. Navy SEAL candidates are trained to have laser focus on successfully completing each training drill and to avoid focusing on completing the entire program.Visualize your success. The SEALs are trained to visualize their success even in their darkest hour. Creating the success in your mind first allows you to convince your other faculties that it is not only possible but probable.
Focus on positive se lf-talk. We each have the power to choose the voice to which we listen. He teaches the SEALs that they can talk themselves into victory or defeat by focusing on opportunities and strengths instead of telling themselves how dire a situation is.
Manage stress. Stress limits our success and threatens our health. The SEAL
commanders understand that it is difficult to convince “tough guys” to meditate so they teach their men to manage stress via 4x4x4 breathing. Quite simply they inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and repeat for four minutes.
So, seriously, how often do you pay attention to your breath? Most of us take breathing for granted and don’t stop to think how deeply we inhale or exhale. But most of us also survive on shallow breaths that have us living on the edge constantly.“We are a nation of shallow breathers,” says Lynne Everatt, coauthor of The 5-Minute Recharge: 31 Proven Strategies to Refresh, Reset, and Become the Boss of Your Day. “Deep breathing comes naturally to children, but we lose the ability because we’re in a constant state of fight-or-flight, low-level stress. Our breathing migrates up in our bodies; it’s an anxious breath. ”Controlled breathing, on the other hand, is the fastest, most effective way to trigger the relaxation response, enabling you to think more clearly and perform better under pressure,'' she says.
“We take better care of our phones than ourselves,” says Everatt. “When our phone
battery goes from green to red, we immediately stop and recharge. But when our own bodies go into the red zone, we push through. Living in the red zone means living in a zone of depletion where we’re more susceptible to burnout, anxiety, or depression.”
The Navy SEALs use two breathing techniques that force the body into a more relaxed
state when they’re in a high-pressure situation, and anyone can use them to control
stress, says Everatt.
Tactical Breathing
“Tactical breathing” is a technique to use when you feel yourself having a fight-or-flight response. It involves all your breathing muscles–from chest to belly. Here’s how it works: Place your right hand on your belly, pushing out with a big exhale. Then breathe in through your nostrils, slowly drawing the breath upward from your belly to your upper chest.
Pause and exhale, starting from your chest and moving downward to the air in your
belly. Imagine your belly button touching your spine. Once you’re comfortable with a full, deep breath, repeat it, this time making the exhale twice as long as the length of the inhale. For example, inhale to the count of four, pause briefly, and exhale to the count of eight. Repeat three times.
Box Breathing
The second Navy SEAL technique is called “box breathing,” and it’s meant to ground
you, sharpen your concentration, and leave you feeling alert but calm. It uses the
tactical breath technique over a longer period of time in a “box pattern.” You inhale,
hold, exhale, hold–each for the same duration. Start by pushing the air out of your chest, keeping your lungs empty for the count of four. Then start the tactical breathing, inhaling through your nose for a count of four, drawing air into your belly and moving up into your chest. Hold the air in your lungs for a count of four. The movement should feel fluid and open; don’t clamp down at the back of your throat. Exhale smoothly, starting at the chest and moving to the belly, for four slow counts. Complete the box with a pause of four before beginning another repetition. Continue this technique for five minutes, building your breath strength by using your full range of breathing muscles as you draw in and push out breath.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a battery reading on our wrist telling us to take a break,”
says Everatt. “We need to sprinkle in small breaks that can energize us when we’re
feeling depleted.” So, the next time you feel that way, just give these techniques a try.
The 40 Percent Rule for Endurance
Did you know that 99 percent of people who start marathons finish them? What are we
to make of this incredibly high success rate? As anyone who has ever run a marathon
can tell you, the correct takeaway isn’t that running 26 miles is a breeze. Everyone hits
a wall of pain at some point, yet almost everyone keeps going. Instead, the real lesson,
according to entrepreneur and endurance athlete Jesse Itzler, “is that we have so much
more in our reserve tank than we think we do.”
Itzler invited a Navy SEAL he met while running a 100-mile race (Itzler was doing it in
relay, the SEAL was doing it alone) to come and stay with his family for a month and
teach them the secrets of mental toughness.
It’s all well and good to tell people they are capable of accomplishing way more than
they believe they are, but when the going gets tough, vague reassurances probably
aren’t going to count for much. That’s why Itzler’s unusual houseguest offered
something more specific than empty encouragement. He taught Itzler the Navy SEALs’ “40 percent rule.”
“He would say that when your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40
percent done,” Itzler explains. “And he had a motto: If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it. And that was his way of every day forcing us to get uncomfortable to figure out what our baseline was and what our comfort level was and just turning it upside down.”
It turns out that the 40 percent rule is why so many people are able to finish marathons.
When you hit that wall, you’re really only 40 percent through your stores of energy and
determination. When your body complains, your will still has a lot to give. And as the
success rate of runners makes clear, that’s true of just about everyone.
That’s handy to know if you suddenly feel like your legs are going to fall off at mile 18 of a marathon, but it’s a truth that can have a huge impact even if long-distance-running really isn’t your thing. Whenever life puts a challenge in your path and you feel like you’re on the edge of giving up, you can lean on the SEALs’ 40 percent rule to remind you that your apparent limits really aren’t.”
“We all have that will. It’s just a matter of how we apply it not just to the once-a-year marathon, but to a variety of things in our daily
lives,” concludes Itzler.
The VUCA World
VUCA is an acronym that also emerged from the military in the 1990s. In a 1998 report
designed to train officers for the twenty-first century, the United States War College
presaged a world that is “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous” —VUCA, for
short.
It describes the “fog of war” — the chaotic conditions that are encountered on a modern battlefield. Its relevance to leaders in business is clear, as these conditions are highly descriptive of the environment in which business is conducted every day. It could also easily describe the world of elite sports competition. Peak performance is a demanded of all aspiring, elite, and professional athletes and coaches.
Traditional leadership and team building techniques are not enough in a VUCA world.
In a VUCA world, things are:
Volatile: Things change unpredictably, suddenly, extremely, especially for the worse.
Uncertain: Important information is not known or definite, doubtful, unclear about the present situation and future outcomes, not able to be relied upon.
Complex: Many different and connected parts: multiple key decision factors, interaction between diverse agents, emergence, adaptation, co-evolution, weak signals.
Ambiguous: Open to more than one interpretation; the meaning of an event can be
understood in different ways. Leading in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous not only presents a challenging environment in which leaders must operate and for executive development programs to have an impact, but also open the door to a range of new competencies that are required in order to succeed.
What you need in a VUCA world is:
Cognitive Readiness, the preparedness and agility to handle the situation at hand and
still prevail, is a valued skill set in the VUCA world. Today’s leaders must be equipped
with the mental, emotional, and interpersonal preparedness for uncertainty and risk.
They also must be ready to learn efficiently in order to deal with change and learn new
habits quickly.
The work of Dr. Warner Burke and his research colleagues at Columbia University
provide us with scientific data that learning agility is made up of nine dimensions or
behavior patterns. They include:
Flexibility – Willingness to try new things
Speed – Rapidly grasping new ideas
Experimenting – Testing out new ideas
Performance Risk Taking – Taking on challenges
Interpersonal Risk Taking – Asking others for help
Collaborating – Leveraging the skills of others
Information Gathering – Increasing your knowledge
Feedback Seeking – Asking for feedback
Reflecting – Taking time to reflect on your effectiveness
Learning how Navy SEALs build mental toughness to handle deadly situations has
become a popular method to teach mental toughness and mental conditioning.