Do we sleep well?

In safety critical work, fatigue is a hot topic of discussion. Risk management often identifies it as a threat to safety and leaders are beginning to understand (and appreciate) that actively managing peoples’ rest is key. The same applies to performance.

Athletes train regularly, subjecting their body to increased physical loads, with the aim of improving their performance. This improvement comes from the body’s ability to rebuild stronger, and where does that rebuild occur? In sleep.

It is widely understood that bone and muscle repair, tissue regrowth and immune system strengthening all occur in stage three (N3), or ‘slow-wave sleep’. This is the deepest stage of sleep we go into, and the hardest to wake from. If you every wake feeling really groggy, or have experienced sleep inertia, you most likely woke from stage N3 of sleep.

Nowadays most people track their sleep with some form of smart device. I’m one of them – whether it’s my Garmin watch or their new Index Sleep Monitor I’ve been trying, in an era of data we seek to be as well informed as we can be. Especially when it comes to athletes, looking to understand their own health and performance. While these trackers do a pretty okay job at estimating our sleep and the time spent in each stage, they’re just that. Estimates.

As a coach, one way I’d advocate ensuring you are getting the best quality of sleep you possibly can is by sitting down with a sleep audit. You don’t need anything fancy; no trackers or machines hooked up to you. Just note down your current sleep routine; when you go to bed, when you wake up, your wind down routine (if you have one), when you last eat/exercise/sit in front of a screen/have caffeine/drink alcohol. These all affect your body’s ability to pass through each sleep stage and effectively recover.

I’ve only mentioned N3 stage of sleep here, but every stage serves different performance systems. If one is lost, it creates a specific failure mode. Checking in with ourselves to see how we currently sleep is a great way to see where any changes can be made. Even if you already sleep pretty well, there is probably something you can do to find that 1% improvement. And those 1% improvements stack up.