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3 good reasons to manage your sleep this holiday season

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This time of year, festivities are plenty and most are likely to find themselves participating in numerous social engagements, last minute shopping trips, and family dinners.

There are many good reasons to get quality sleep year round, but during the holidays making the effort to properly manage your sleep will mean better enjoyment of your time and a safe and productive return to work. Here are three reasons why:

1. What holiday stress? – Studies show that well rested people have better stress management – Getting good sleep means handling that dinner with the meddling family member or sibling rivalry with much more grace and much less stress.

2. Consume less calories – Well rested people are known to consume less calories and make better dietary judgements. Studies show that you are more likely to eat fat and calorie laden food when you are tired. Of course you want to enjoy those cookies, festive cheese platters, and Dad’s famous gravy, but getting sleep might be a good way to make sure you aren’t so inclined to overdo it.

3. Safe and happy travels – An abundance of holiday gatherings can mean a lot of miles on the road. Keeping up with your sleep means you will have better reaction time and make smarter decisions while driving.

If you are fortunate enough to enjoy some extra time off during the holidays, take advantage of the opportunity to bank sleep or make up for your previous sleep debt so you can return to work safe and productive in the new year. If your schedule requires that you keep working alongside all the seasonal festivities, be sure to take advantage of any opportunity you have to maintain sleep and have friends or family support your need to be productive at work throughout the holidays by providing a quiet environment to sleep or nap when you need it.

While 7-9 hours of nightly sleep is ideal to maintain good mental effectiveness and safety, there may be a few whose holiday social and work demands interfere with getting sufficient sleep. If you are balancing a number of demands and aren’t able to get all the sleep you need, take extra caution with or postpone safety sensitive tasks as the holidays wind up and plan to make sleep your #1 priority in the new year.

From the team at Fatigue Science, have a safe and restful holiday season!

For athletes sleep is about more than just winning a game

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We often talk about the importance of managing athletes sleep and schedules to optimize a professional athlete’s performance at game time, but the less immediate benefits of ensuring players are rested can be seen in the length of their careers and likelihood of health-issues or injuries.

Yes, a strategically rested basketball player will be 9.3% more likely to make that three-point shot at the buzzer and a baseball player more likely to swing at the right time to hit that fastball – but there is evidence to show that athletes who pay attention to sleep suffer less injuries and have longer careers.

A study conducted at the University of California looked at whether over-scheduling and lack of sleep contributed to injuries in youth athletes and concluded that fatigue-related injuries were related to sleeping less than 6 hours the night before a game. Additionally, the study concluded that a number of factors, including activity volume, intensity, sleep time and recovery time should be considered in order to optimize the player safety when scheduling sporting events. Another study, conducted by sleep researcher Dr. Christopher Winter, examined the fatigue levels of NFL and MLB players and found a relation between athlete sleepiness and career longevity in both leagues.

When an athlete is not getting sufficient sleep, the effects on personal performance and health are threefold: First, fatigue affects reaction time, making a tired athlete slower to react to a potential hit on the ice or the field. Second, fatigue affects the body’s immune system, making players more susceptible to bouts of illness. Third, shorter sleep periods do not provide the body with sufficient time to regenerate cells and repair the abuse from workouts and games. Over time, game-earned injuries, health issues and the inability to fully recover can wear on an athlete and contribute to early retirement or career-ending injuries and performance failure.

In professional sports, season’s are lengthy and require careful planning to manage an athlete’s performance to reduce mid or end season fatigue. Including the post-season, NHL players can expect to play up to 34 weeks out of the year. It’s not much better for NBA, MLB and NFL players who, respectively, can see up to 32, 30, and 20 weeks of action in a season. Even Tiger Woods was fatigued by the end of this year’s PGA season.

For optimal sport performance and fatigue mitigation, it’s not just about how long you sleep, it’s also about when you sleep and how well you sleep. Factor in the long professional sport season, team travel and practice, and scheduling sleep to maximize the performance of a team or athlete becomes a complicated endeavour – but one that team management should examine for both the short and longer term performance of their athletes.

Check out this blog post to see which professional athletes are currently making sleep a priority.

Are fatigued referees hurting your favourite team’s shot at a championship?

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The life of a professional referee in the NHL, NBA or world premiere soccer may sound glamorous and fun (the travel! the games!) but the reality is, their schedules can be even more demanding than those of the athletes themselves and may contribute to game refereeing errors and stress.

In 2008 Mike Leggo wrote about a week in the life of an NHL referee. On day one, he leaves his home on the West Coast for a next day game in Washington. “The trip is a demanding four games in five days,” he says, “encompassing Washington, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Columbus…Six nights, seven flights, two countries, thousands of air miles…all in a week in the life of an NHL referee”.

Hockeybuzz.com blog recently interviewed NHL referee, Paul Devorski: “There’s actually quite a bit of travel,” Paul confirms, “It’s hard to do, but they try to travel you around so you get to see every team X amount of times, so that keeps you busy. Our road trips are anywhere from a week to 10 days.” He enjoys the actual experience of game officiating, but admits “Honesty, the travel gets wear and tear on you.”

Fatiguing schedules aren’t just a problem for referees in the NHL. The NBA’s Pat Fraher told RefereeMindset.com that the life of an NBA ref is busy: “Travel is hectic…a different city every 2 days for about 25 days a month.” Last year Dallas Maverick’s owner, Mark Cuban, pointed out that the “stressful travel schedule of the condensed season” might have contributed to the “poor quality of officiating”.  And in UK Premiership soccer, West Ham United manager, Sam Allardyce, stressed that their “referees are travelling all over the country and out in Europe” for the duration of their seasons. He has famously blamed referee fatigue for decision errors during games, “Fatigue is everything in terms of decision making,” he said back in December, “Once it kicks in you lose the ability to make those decisions correctly…They need to ease the load on the referees we have.”

Professional sport teams are starting to take a more analytical look at the ways that training and travel schedules affect their athletes’ fatigue and game time effectiveness, but who is addressing those of the referees when the wrong call can make the difference in a team’s league standing?

Our own Pat Byrne recently spoke to Vancouver’s Team 1040 radio about fatigue management and professional sports, acknowledging the frustrations that team management and players must face when the wrong calls change their game momentum, “You’re doing all the training, you’re doing all the coaching, you’re doing everything you possibly can and then you get a tired official making a dumb mistake…you miss a hand ball, you miss a penalty and you lose a game….It’s fixable” he says.

NBC Sports: Mavericks getting scientific about sleep, fatigue and game performance

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From NBC Sports’ Pro Basketball Talk Blog, Kurt Helin writes:

For a lot of NBA players, sleep is something they fit in around everything else. Especially younger players. They tend to stay up late, get a few hours sleep, go through practice/shoot around, get an afternoon nap then be ready for the game (or whatever is on tap) that night.

By the time that guys are in the league a while, you hear them talk about altering their schedules to make sure they are getting enough sleep because they see it impacts their performance on the court.

Now the Dallas Mavericks are trying to quantify that improvement…

Factoring sleep into game performance a ‘slam dunk’ for Dallas Mavericks

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We are pleased to announce that 2011 NBA Champions, Dallas Mavericks, will be using our game-changing technology to help manage player fatigue and performance during the hectic NBA season.

“Athletes and trainers understand that timing and consistency of workouts, practice, and nutritional intake is important to the players game performance” says Fatigue Science Founder and VP, Pat Byrne, “they also know sleep is important, but previously they have not had the ability to  measure sleep and fatigue – our technology can not only do that, but analyze the data and provide validated solutions to optimize the teams performance.”

The technology, currently used by the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks as well as other professional teams in the NFL, MLS and Olympics, includes Fatigue Science’s Readibands – a virtually indestructible band that can track micro movements in the wrist to measure sleep and activity, and F.A.S.T. (Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool) – which analyzes data collected from the wristbands to create a customized fatigue avoidance solution. Using the data collected, scientifically-based recommendations will be made for player travel, training and rest period scheduling to mitigate fatigue and maximize reaction time and effectiveness during game play.

ESPN recently reported on some challenges in the Mavericks’ away game schedule this season: “Five of the Mavs’ final seven games are on the road, including a four-game-in-six-night stretch that starts against the two L.A. teams.” It’s the effects of these tough scheduling terms that teams try to mitigate when they look for ways to deal with player fatigue. “Sleep is only one  variable, but perhaps the most important,” Pat Byrne says, “Teams can ensure their players have the opportunity to maximize their performance at game time. Even just 10% loss of effectiveness can make a difference between winning or losing.”

Pat traveled to Dallas this past (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend to train the players and management on the use of the technology. Sports fans and tech watchers can start trying to spot the Readiband on the Mavericks line up in the coming weeks.

Former Clinton HHR Secretary told employees to “Get more sleep”

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Former Health and Human Resources Secretary, Donna Shalala, recently told the Huffington Post that during the Clinton administration, she advised her employees to get more sleep, declaring: “President Clinton hired us for our judgment, not our stamina”.

Shalala, now President of the University of Miami, knew the value of consistent quality sleep on performance and actively ‘discouraged sleep deprivation among staff’ according to the Huffington Post.

With a multitude of studies demonstrating that sleep deprivation can cumulate to the point where workers are operating at levels equivalent to being legally impaired, it’s encouraging to see a high level political figure publicly state that sleep is essential.

A Harvard Business Review journal titled Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer, also addresses the issue of executives ‘burning the candle at both ends’ and reminds us of the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation: “Stay awake longer than 18 consecutive hours, and your reaction speed, short-term and long-term memory, ability to focus, decision-making capacity, math processing, cognitive speed, and spatial orientation all start to suffer.” Regardless of this, the piece claims, “frenzied corporate cultures still confuse sleeplessness with vitality and high performance.”

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School shares his advice to corporate leaders and observes that they have a responsibility to take sleeplessness seriously: “If you want to raise performance—both your own and your organization’s—you need to pay attention to this fundamental biological issue”.

Czeisler suggests that companies should implement policies, much like they have in place for other health and safety matters, that address sleep and fatigue. Allowing extra time for executives to adjust to time zones when travelling for business, or not permitting employees to drive after taking a red-eye flight are just a sampling of what corporations should consider in writing these policies. “Such a policy requires some good schedule planning,” Czeisler says, “but the time spend making adjustments will be worth it, for the traveler will be more functional before going into that important meeting.”

Shalala’s orders to her staff may not have been part of a formal policy but she was certainly ahead of where most corporations are, even more than a decade later, in terms of considering the importance of sleep on employee health and effectiveness.