Why Golfers Need High-Quality Sleep
Keys to Building Better Sleep Habits
Sleep is important.
However, prioritizing sleep and building good sleep habits is challenging in today’s world.
Despite needing between 7-9 hours of sleep, 35.2% of all adults in the U.S. report sleeping on average for less than seven hours per night1.
We face an internal struggle, choosing between what we know we should do (sleep more) and the direction the modern world is pulling us towards (sleep less).
Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward more speed, more switching, less sleep. We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.
This post is inspired by a book I recently read titled Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johan Harri. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from this book.
Sleep & Performance
From a golf-performance perspective, sleep is crucial.
The purpose of practice is to reduce the gap between your current and desired level of performance.
Lack of sleep makes it harder for us to retain what we learn.
During deep sleep powerful brainwaves act like a file transfer mechanism shifting what we have learned from a short-term fragile storage bay to a robust long-term memory bank locking in changes to our mental structures, ensuring that learning sticks. When we're deprived of sleep, the Hippocampus, the part of the brain which acts as our memory storage system, shuts down. On just five hours of sleep, incoming files are effectively bounced and we end up with a 40% deficit in memory and learning. — James A. King
Lack of sleep jeopardizes the return on investment for our golf practice.
Imagine that we have a finite 100 units of effort to spend each day. To maximize our units of progress, we must invest them as effectively as possible. — James A. King
Poor quality sleep means we have fewer “units of effort” that we can invest.
Even worse, we won’t get the full benefits from the invested effort because of the 40% reduction in memory and learning that lack of sleep causes.
You likely wouldn't show up intoxicated to a tournament, would you? But lack of sleep has side effects that are equivalent to being drunk.
If you stay awake for eighteen hours — so you woke up at 6 a.m. and went to sleep at midnight — by the end of the day, your reactions are equivalent to if you had 0.05% blood alcohol...Stay up another three hours, and you're (the equivalent of being) legally drunk.
While you may not be pulling all-nighters before tournaments, missing just a few hours of sleep over a few weeks can have similar effects.
Many people say, “Well, I don't stay up all night, so I'm fine”; but in fact, if you miss a couple of hours of deep sleep every night and you do this night after night, within a week or two, you're at the same level of performance and impairment as you would be staying up all night. Everybody falls apart with two nights of missed sleep or you can get to that same point by sleeping four or five hours a night and going for a couple of weeks." As he said this. I remembered: 40 percent of us live on the brink of that.
The “Simple” Keys To High-Quality Sleep
There are four keys to improving overall sleep quality.
No artificial sources of light in the bedroom
We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.
Avoid screens at least two hours prior to bed
Store your phone in a different room overnight
Set the bedroom temperature to between 60-67℉ (15.6-19.4°C)2
Our body needs to cool its core to send you to sleep, and the harder that is, the longer it takes
These four points are “simple”, yet difficult to implement because of our modern lifestyles.
Caffeine, Diet & Sleep
To compensate for not abiding by these four "simple" sleep keys we fuel ourselves with concoctions that help us push through the day. However, these beverages have a series of negative effects on the body.
Throughout the day, in your brain, a chemical called adenosine is building up, and it signals to you when you are sleepy. Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You're not giving yourself more energy — you're just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you're doubly exhausted.
Add a poor diet to bad sleep habits and excessive caffeine reliance and things get even worse.
Our blood sugar is on a constant rollercoaster, and the price of admission for this ride is our attention.
We currently eat a diet that causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes. If you eat (say) a Twinkie...your blood sugar is going through the roof and then crashing back down again. That's going to affect how you can actually physically focus, because if your energy is through the floor, you're not going to be able to give things your full attention.
Now, you may not literally be eating a Twinkie for breakfast, but traditional breakfast foods still spike our blood sugar.
But most of us now start the day with the equivalent of a Twinkie, though we don't realize it...People will eat maybe a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast in the morning. It's usually Frosties and white bread. Because there's very little fiber in there, glucose, which gives you energy, will be released very, very rapidly. So your blood sugar goes really high, really quickly, which is great for about twenty minutes. Then it crashes down, and when it crashes down, that's when you're knackered, and at this point, you get brain fog.
To make things worse, our lack of sleep makes us want to eat more.
Lack of sleep also wreaks havoc with the hormones that regulate appetite, increasing levels of a hormone called Ghrelin that makes us hungry and simultaneously depressing levels of another hormone called Leptin that inhibits the desire to eat.
It’s a vicious cycle. We don’t sleep enough, so our body triggers a response that makes us hungry. We then fuel ourselves with caffeine and sugary foods that spike our blood sugar. We repeat this throughout the day to keep us going. All the while blocking the receptors in our body that let us know when we are actually tired.
“Working hard” and a “positive mindset” won’t counteract all the self-inflicted damage created by sacrificing sleep and a poor diet.
Sleep & Phone
Our phone plays a major role in our inability to sleep.
Between 10% and 30% of adults struggle with chronic insomnia.3
Insomnia is a sleep disorder in which you have trouble falling and/or staying asleep.4
From an evolutionary perspective, insomnia serves a purpose:
We struggle to sleep when we experience stress and hyper-vigilance. If you don't feel safe, then you'll be unable to wind down, because your body is saying to you: You're in danger; stay alert. So the inability to sleep...isn't a malfunction, it's an adaptive trait, under circumstances of perceived threat.
Our phone is an always-present subtle reminder to be vigilant.
We also need to have different relationships with our phones…to many of us, it's like your baby…So as a new parent, you're like I've got to be vigilant for this thing. I've got to pay attention. I'm not sleeping as deeply. Or you are like a firefighter who's listening for a call. We’re constantly a little tensed to see: "Did something happen?"
To combat insomnia and improve the overall quality of our sleep, we have to alleviate the mental tension that we experience.
We need to alleviate the sources of the anxiety and stress to effectively treat insomnia.
Cruel Optimism
Telling a golfer to shut off their phone before bed is a simplistic solution that ignores the fact that modern life is extremely screen-dependent.
90% of Americans look at a glowing electronic device in the hour before they go to bed
This overly-simplified advice is a form of "Cruel Optimism".
This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture — like obesity, depression, or addiction, and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon, but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.
Yes, the four keys to improving overall sleep are “simple”, in theory, but the cultural/societal expectations and norms are what make them difficult to implement.
Disconnecting someone from their phone for two hours prior to bed will likely create a void. That void has to be filled with meaningful activities that enrich a person's life. The simplistic advice to “shut off the phone”, doesn’t address how to fill that void.
Addressing these deeper issues takes more time and effort than simply providing a shallow recommendation that sounds good in theory but is somewhat useless in reality.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. — Albert Einstein
Conclusion
High-quality sleep allows golfers to capitalize on the time and effort invested into improving their game.
The four keys are:
No artificial sources of light in the bedroom
Avoid screens at least two hours prior to bed
Store your phone in a different room overnight
Set your bedroom temperature to between 60-67℉ (15.6-19.4°C)
Although these four keys are “simple”, they require golfers to address underlying issues related to their:
Nutrition/Diet
Reliance on caffeine
Relationship with their phone
If the deeper underlying issues aren’t addressed, it will be difficult for golfers to build high-quality, sustainable sleep habits.
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/sleep-facts-statistics#:~:text=Statistics%20About%20Sleep%20Disorders&text=It%20is%20believed%20that%20between,obstructive%20sleep%20apnea%20(OSA).
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/best-temperature-for-sleep#:~:text=The%20best%20bedroom%20temperature%20for,for%20the%20most%20comfortable%20sleep.
Bhaskar, S., Hemavathy, D., & Prasad, S. (2016). Prevalence of chronic insomnia in adult patients and its correlation with medical comorbidities. Journal of family medicine and primary care, 5(4), 780–784. https://doi.org/10.4103/2249-4863.201153
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/insomnia-symptoms-and-causes#:~:text=Insomnia%20is%20a%20sleep%20disorder,for%203%20months%20or%20more.