Lost Sleep is Hard to Find...
Just came across this yesterday. New research recently published in Science Translational Medicine (one of my favs!) shows that the brain "keeps track of how much -- or little -- sleep we've been getting for weeks". While you can quickly make up for multiple nights of little to no sleep, you'll only feel "good" for a short while. In other words poor sleeping habits can have a chronic affect on your ability to function on a daily basis. The study looked at subjects who were forced onto a 33-hours awake / 10-hours asleep scheudle (about 5.6 hours per day) and saw dramatic decreases in their ability to handle even basic tasks.
Think about it folks...how much sleep are you getting???
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My brain rarely allows me to sleep more than 6 hours a night. So, I was wondering if naps during the day count towards getting the recommended amount of sleep?
I guess I need some help :-)
More sleep would be better for sure. Even uninterrupted sleep would be wonderful in my house. While the kids are now 5 and 6 it seems like it is fairly typical for someone to be up in the middle of the night for something. I find 7 hours is about ideal for me. Often it does not happen.
My friend Dev Paul is a big proponent of logging sleep hours. Says that it makes you plan ahead to make sure you get enough just like other training hours and that when the sleep hours go down the race times go up. Never been that anal but it does make sense. Ask anyone with an infant in the house how they are feeling?
Good information but sleep is for people with nothing else to do
I would love to consistently get over 5 hours sleep.
I'm also someone who cant turn off their head but have found that earplugs really help me get to sleep and sleep well through the night. Of course, I'm at the mercy of ninjas creeping into my house but hopefully the dogs will wake me up in time.
If they are true Ninjas you would not hear them even without earplugs, and if he has snacks RnS will be taken care of.
Bill, I'll take that action.
One of my goals this season has been to get 8.5 to 9h nightly, plus hour-long naps on Saturday and Sunday immediately after workouts, and sleep-ins where possible. In those weeks I can manage to do this consistently, I feel great and I train well. It's easier to get to the 'starting line' for workouts, there isn't that blanket of fatigue that normally takes 10-20 ' of warmup to shake off, and I have much much more mental energy to draw upon when things get tough late in key sessions. Moreover, I've found I'm able to more readily make the connection between the mental skills I've been trying to develop 'off the field' and the physical performance during sessions. When I'm not as well rested, a lot of sessions are just by the numbers and don't have the same depth, if that makes sense.
Is there a greater or better adaptation that comes with all this rest? I'd like to think so. Or at least there isn't the degree of compromise to adaptations that I feel like when I'm chronically (or cumulatively) fatigued. Physiologically, I'd love to hear from the WSMs on this, but from anything i've read, this much rest definitely ain't a bad thing generally, and is a pretty good thing for endurance athletes.
Thing is, it's hard and takes a lot of discipline and planning (and the discipline doesn't have the immediate bang-for the buck that, say, a hard interval or aero wheel might). And I have very very few responsibilities when compared to what most people on this board seem to juggle. If being a triathlete doesn't already entail a high degree of selfishness, carving out even more time for excessive rest pushes it to the extreme.
On balance, though, I hope it's worth it to get some kind of performance advantage.
I can't sleep in anymore. Even when I don't have to be up, I can't sleep past 6. I'm in bed at 10 pm reading, with the lights out at about 10:15 to 10:30.
I agree that this may be a key factor I am not managing well that contributed to the heavy fatigue feeling that I had at the end of the out-season.
Otto & Lilly are very good role models when it comes to sleep. I wish I could crash so easily and peacefully as they do!
And there's no making up for lost sleep. I've been trying to catch up on all the sleep lost during residency for the last 10 years and haven't even come close.
I have a huge competitive advantage in that, if I planned it, I could easily get in a 1-2hr nap during the day and be in bed by 9-10p. However, the dogs won't let us sleep past 6a.
One of the fittest times of my life (strength wise, certainly not endurance) was when I was deployed. When you're a Marine on a Navy ship, there isnt much for you to do except workout, sleep, eat, and stay out of the way. I was lifting/training 2-3hrs/day and probably sleeping 10-12hrs. We called it the "horizontal time acceleration chamber," ie, the more time you spent asleep the shorter the deployment was
I'm not a sleep expert, but the issue does come up with regularity in my medical practice. There is apparently a wide variation in sleep needs among humans, with a range of 6.5 hours to 8.5 hours being the norm. More than that and less than that are more likely to be associated with problems. More sleep: depression, less sleep: fatigue, memory difficulties, poor task performance and emotional irritability. Sleep is when metabolic repair occurs and brain activity ("memory" and learned tasks) is consolidated.
Sleep QUALITY is as important as total sleep TIME, as Matt suggests. Being awakened several times at night so you don't get at least 90 minutes of uninterrupted sleep ( by whatever - babies, bladder, cats, phone) can prevent those repairs and lead to problems even if you get all the sleep you need.
Also, everyone is on a different internal clock. I think there's a built in genetic component to this. Back when we lived in small clans of 20-50 people, surrounded by dangers both human and animal, it was good for the group if someone was always up. So both early risers and night owls were selected for, as they and their clans survived better. (This is totally my theory, not backed by any research or scientific vetting.) Anyway, Life works best for you if you follow your clock and don't try to fight it. It's like resting and maximum heart rates - we're all gonna be different, and it's not a competition.
So I'm a little worried if someone says they consistently get 5 hours of sleep - maybe only 2-3% of us can do that and still function well over the long haul. Try throwing away the alarm clock for a week, and see how much sleep you really need.
You just killed my hope! I keep thinking that someday I'll be able to catch up!
I was wondering if anyone has any personal experience with race times improving after getting more sleep, and if this was true even if you got more sleep at the expense of training time. I tend to manage to get workouts in at the expense of sleep, because, frankly, if I didn't ever workout when I was tired I'd never work out. I'm still in my g-surg residency and as such end up missing full nights of sleep on a regular basis--when I eventually get home I'll nap but get up later to run, etc when in reality my body would be perfectly happy staying asleep.
I know all of the studies or articles, etc. tell me I should ideally get enough sleep AND my workouts, but if I have to pick one? ... Any experience here?
Just looking for an excuse to stay in bed sometimes...
But I don't have kids or pets.
Nemo, this is the gold standard in napping.
I read about pzizz recently and have started using it for a quick 20 minute refresher nap and at night to go to sleep when I can't turn my mind off. I also used it on the flights to Europe to sleep on the plane. Check it out: www.pzizz.com. They also have iphone apps. You might listen to the samples and see what you think. After the 20 pzizz nap, I honestly feel mentally refreshed and ready to go. It is amazing.
I also agree with what others have said about sleep being a key component of recovery. It is during sleep when your body releases HGH and allows your body to heal. I know other RDs who work with collegiate level athletes. One said he had two guys working on body composition changes. They were identical except for amounts of sleep. The one who got his sleep (I think 10 hours/night) was the one who got the body composition changes.
@ Shannon - If you're in a General Surgery residency, presumably your attendings have already told you you don't need no stinkin' sleep!
@Al: direct quote from my current chair: "Sleep is overrated."
Yeah, I was serious: been there, heard that, and lived to tell about it. But then, I wasn't also trying to train for long distance triathlon at the same time. I guess the hierarchy is: patient care, sleep, then workout. Then, eat if you have time.
I'll suggest an order change: patient care, eat, sleep, then workout. I almost put eating before patient care. If you don't eat then you don't have the energy to do any of the rest. JMHO.
One thing that helps is avoiding caffeine after noon, as in 12pm, and limiting how much I consume in the morning. When I was in my early 20’s I was working a full time job and checking ID’s at the door of a bar 3 nights a week. The bar didn’t close until 4am during the week and 5am on the weekends. I was consuming so much coffee and Red Bull that even when I did get down time sleep wouldn’t come easy. When I quit the second job I also had to quit caffeine because I wasn’t getting any sleep. It took a month but I adjusted. Didn’t get the headaches but wasn’t really able to fully wake up. There was a LOT of sleeping but eventually I discovered that we get energy from the food we eat and started to pay attention to how the different foods affected my energy levels. After about 6 months of no caffeine or coffee (decaf doesn’t taste the same) I started drinking again because I really enjoy a cup in the morning.
Now I’ll have about two cups a day and make sure that my last cup is no later than 11:30 and there are no issues sleeping at night.
My sleep issues are related to a rotating schedule. The biggest problem is making the switch from the night shift to days. I also tend to be an evening person. Being an evening person, it challenging to get myself to sleep before 10 pm, so I only get 51/2 hrs before having to be up and at work at 630am. That triggers my caffeine- 4 shots of espresso over ice . My body never knows if it is coming or going
( Keith Buell and Suzanne Kinsky witnessed this on our drive up to Lake Placid, every time they looked back at me I was asleep)
I try to do the catch up. 1-2 days/week, don't set the alarm see when I wake up, how many hrs. tends to be about 8.5.
I am still playing with my schedule to get aome kind of routine, and still meet my off shift requirements. I am toying with the idea of getting script for sleeping pill to get my self off the night schedule that first night. up til now, i have been resisting.
On average I get about 6-7 hours a night. I try to be in bed by 10, hopefully I am asleep by about 10:30, and I get up at 5am on average. The 30 minute turnaround from getting into bed and falling asleep may seem quick, and it is, I used to be one of the roll around for hours types and had lots of issues with falling asleep. Since starting triathlon and giving up caffiene I no longer have those issues, I'm still completely unable to take a nap during the daytime but I've developed a top secret strategy where when I hit my bed, load up podcast on my phone and make sure all of the lights are off, I'm out cold pretty fast.
6-7 hours may sound like a lot, to me it doesn't but compared to you guys it may, but for my age I think I get way less sleep than most of my counterparts. At 25 my friends are both amazed and horrified that I'll wake up at 5:30am on a Saturday, and I'm amazed and horrified that they will wake up at 12pm, eat, then nap again all afternoon. Weekends are far too precious to spend in bed. A few short years ago I used to be horrified at the idea of getting up much before 7 or 8, but these days my "perfect night" is going to bed before 11 and sleeping until about 7:30 or so like I usually do on Sundays, when I get a full 8 hours of sleep I usually wake up feeling like a million bucks. However if I sleep much more than that, I'll feel groggy and slugish, more is not always better for me. In the years since college I've definitely been able to get away with less and less sleep, but the idea of only getting 5 hours a night definitely does not sound appealing to me, I'm working on trying to make sure I at least get 7 a night or mix in one day a week, where I'll move back a morning workout and sleep in until 'normal' work time for a recharge.
I was blown away by how different my ability to handle hard training was. I had the best performances of my life. And i felt good.
Now, i see the same phenomenon. Training was picking up OK, but then the damn NBA finals torpedoed the sleep cycle, and I'm still trying to get myself back to some regular rhythm. A big part of. The problems i had this winter were undoubtedly due to a lack of sleep. When I don't sleep, all the rest of it doesn't matter much. Last week's aqua bike was another stunning example of it to me (amazing that i still have to learn this lesson over and over).
Ok, now I've gotta go get myself to bed!
Mike
Coach P,
Good stuff, as a sleep expert,(firefighter) I can tell you, sleep all you want but nothing beats a good nap in the afternoon. We are up all hours of the night and then I get home to my wife who can put any of the guys at work to shame in the snoring dept so i too must wear ear plugs and then have dreams about the house burning down and not hearing a thing.
I do know one thing, if my race in Lp goes south, I know which excuse I'll use
My plan, eat, sleep ,train, sleep, repeat!! I'm ready to go for Lp. Bring on the pain!!
Pg