Sleep and the athlete - psychomotor vigilance

Psychomotor vigilance performance is important to athletic performance. Sleep experts use the word “vigilance” to roughly describe alertness and ability to do mental tasks. The vigilance is influenced by sleep’s homeostatic process. You can think of this process causing a build-up of pressure for sleep during wakefulness and a dissipation of pressure during sleep. The body’s circadian rhythm process produces a waxing and waning of pressure for wakefulness throughout the day.

This skill involves reaction time and sustained attention. It is needed for not only sports performance but also everyday activities such as driving. It is highly sensitive to sleep loss, often experienced by athletes on road trips, particularly after they cross multiple time zones.

When athletes aren’t getting enough sleep, these two processes cause performance to deteriorate progressively, modulated within days by further performance reductions at night and relative improvements during the daytime. As the homeostatic pressure for sleep builds up higher across prolonged wakefulness, the rate of dissipation of that pressure during subsequent sleep is enhanced exponentially, so that even brief periods of sleep provide significant performance recuperation. Nevertheless, sleep restriction practiced on a chronic basis induces cumulative performance deficits of the same order of magnitude as observed during total sleep deprivation. There are also considerable individual differences in the degree of vulnerability to performance impairment from sleep loss.

Variations in sports performance may reflect normal ebb and flow of biological rhythms. Marked differences between time of training and time of competition also may dent an athlete's performance. Studies have shown that when athletes are allowed to sleep until "slept out," their mood, energy level, and sense of well-being increase. Does the well-rested athlete have a "secret" advantage? The value of sleep is hardly a secret.

Elite athletes often suffer problems due to domestic or occupational schedules that do not permit normal sleep schedules and to rapid travel across multiple time zones (jet lag). Endurance athletes often have a problem with immuno-suppression and chronic reduction in sleep can contribute to this. Indeed, even in non-athletes, sleep deprivation can suppress the immune system.

A related and largely unresolved question is the effect of exercise on sleep quality in regular people (non-athletes).

Resources

Avoiding Drowsy Driving

Countermeasures

Responsibility and the Drowsy Driver

Signs of Drowsiness when Driving

How Well Are You Sleeping? - FDA Consumer Article

Circadian gene helps brain predict mealtime

Sleep less, live longer? - Increased Death Rate Associated
With Sleeping 8 Hours or More

Circadan Rythyms

"And miles to go before I sleep"

(Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)