Picture this, it's coming up to the end of the season, the big game, the big match, the competition. You've done everything you needed to do. You've trained hard, you've trained smart, everything that can be done has been done. You've even been looking after your nutrition, your hydration. I mean, hell, you've even prioritised your sleep. You've been getting eight hours. So your recovery and your rehab has been fantastic. But all of a sudden you get into bed and the eight hours planned sleep you had before the big game, you're now looking at the ceiling, you're thinking to yourself, go to sleep, you need to sleep. What if I don't sleep? You're playing out in your mind those but what-ifs: What if I don't perform? What if I'm not good enough? What if I haven't done enough? What if what I've been practising and preparing for isn't what I need for the big game tomorrow? And then all of a sudden, that eight hours, you're now looking at the clock. It's 1 o'clock in the morning, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, It's 3 o'clock and the eight hours become three.
It's a common scenario that many of us go through, whether it's the big game, the competition, or whether it's an exam at school or something at work. That trouble sleeping is such a common issue for athletes and probably one of the most commonly asked strategies that I get asked about. How in the hell do I deal with the fact that I can't sleep?
And that's what we're going to focus on in today's podcast, Brain in the Game episode 108, sleep.
So, I think I'm very well qualified to talk about the sleep issues as it's something that I've struggled with and has been my Achilles heel throughout my career, whether that be my sporting career, my academic career or my professional career. And it's even though everything I know about sleep and how important it is from a health perspective, poor sleep has been linked to such diseases as dementia, Alzheimer's, even down to things like neuroplasticity issues. We know that inflammation in our brain and the plaques that come with that are having a big impact on people's longevity and quality of life. But today, what I want to talk about is, is the challenges athletes face when they get hit by the sleep issues. In order for us to understand, unpack this and talk about some really key strategies that you can all implement, we've got to first understand why we're having the issues. And in order to do that, we've got to have a bit of a chemistry lesson.
So we know that one of the biggest challenges around sleep is our fear mechanism. Laying there, worrying, contemplating, playing the what-if game. What if I'm not good enough? What if I've not done enough? What if I'm not ready? What if I make a mistake? And all of those concerns and worries have legitimacy because we want to do well. We want to perform the best we possibly can. And in order to do that, we've got to be able to trust.
Those of you who have listened to any of my podcasts, been to any of my trainings, or read any of my literature, would know that we talk a lot about the quality of trust in order to perform under pressure. But in those wee hours of the night, it's very easy for us to catastrophise. It's very easy for us to think about all of those things that we don't have and aren't doing or maybe we haven't got. And if they're legitimate concerns, it's probably a little bit late to be worrying about not having done enough training, not prepared enough, or not even really focused enough on what is working, how I can trust. But if the legitimacy of those concerns isn't real, then what's actually happening inside our brain and part of our evolution as a human species comes down to these sleep issues.
Many other species on the planet have learned to stay alive and stay safe whilst they're sleeping by adopting the ability to either shut down half their brain so they stay alert or hibernate, or they just might be the apex predators that other animals worry about.
Humans, we don't have that as an option. We don't have the biggest claws, we're not the strongest, we're certainly not the fastest, and we are the most vulnerable when we're asleep. So what we do is our brain has become very effective and efficient at only sleeping as long as we need to or as long as we think we need to, and then it dumps our body full of cortisol, so that we wake up really alert and instantly. This is why the first thing that happens in the morning when you get out of bed, you are dumped full of cortisol – your fight or flight mechanism – the hormone that rushes through your body and prepares you for the worst case scenario. So if we know that we're the most vulnerable when we're asleep and our brain is looking for a reason to wake us up and make us alert, then it makes sense that in order for us to sleep efficiently and effectively, we've got to feel safe, we've got to feel secure, we've got to make sure that anything that we're concerned about, we've got a strategy to deal with and manage.
And in here lies a big part of our challenge around competition and big events, why we can sometimes get consumed with those what-ifs, those fear mechanisms, and why we lay awake trying to solve those problems. As a human, the biggest asset of our brain is our ability to utilise our imagination. And when we utilise our imagination, we come up with strategies to deal with the things that we think are our biggest threats. That's allowed us to get to the top of the food chain. It's not because we're physically better, it's because we're mentally and emotionally stronger. But with that brings part of our biggest challenge. Because when we highlight something as being really important to us, like the game day, the competition, the result, the outcome, what we tend to do is question. And the things we thought we trusted, the things we thought that were in the bag, we start to re-analyse and start to think, okay, what if I'm not ready? What if I haven't done enough? What if the process I've been going through – looking after my body, mentally, emotionally and physically – isn't enough for tomorrow's performance? What if I do something that makes me look stupid, hurts me or embarrasses me?
All of these are very humanistic concerns and form part of the reason for our preparation process. Those of you who have watched me before, I talk about the funnel: you don't have to feel ready, you've got to know you're ready. And in part, this process is designed not only for you to replicate a good performance on game day, but it's also to put your fear mechanism at bay. Because when you've got a competition, a big event the next day, and you turn around and go, I'm really nervous. And look, let's be honest, you probably will be. And so you should be. It's important to you being able to turn around and go, I'm nervous, but I know I'm ready, I know I've done enough, I know I'm strong enough, I know I've hit enough routines, kicked enough goals, hit enough balls to be able to turn around. And your brain goes, okay, we've got this. I don't have to dump my body full of cortisol and panic and create the what if mechanisms. So there's some long term strategies that we should be implementing into our training that will help deal with that sleep issue and create a very happy and healthy and strategic sleep pattern that isn't always the whole solution.
Sometimes it doesn't matter how much we've done, we can still lay awake at night and create the what if game. If we treat competition day like the end step, the be all the end or the most important thing, our only metric of success, then of course what we've just done is raised its importance to us, we've raised its value, its consequence to us. Then all of a sudden we see it as something unique, not something that we're prepared for and trained for. So again, in our preparation process, by having some of our competition in every training session, allows us to take our trained version of us into competition. All of these fundamental thought processes and strategies are designed to normalise our performance, to normalise the expectations. And with normalisation of these expectations, our brain can go, yeah, I've got this. And sleep becomes less of a issue. Now, like I said, I think I'm quite well qualified to be able to speak to you about sleep issues because throughout my life it's definitely been the one thing that I've had to constantly work on. There's been times throughout my life where two and three hours sleep have been normalised for me and typically in high stress situations and sometimes there's been relevance to that where I'm not actually prepared and I don't know what's coming.
But that's not always been the case. And what I've done is a lot of research into what's going on in our minds and in our brains and in our bodies during these poor sleep. And so if structural awareness, preparation and metrics are a good way for us to control those urges, to overthink, to worry about the consequences, to constantly question, have I done enough? Am I enough? Then you would think, okay, cool, that's a framework that we can implement and the whole sleep issue will go away. No, because it's not always about that. Sometimes we have to create a really healthy sleep pattern when in times of not being stressed so that we can utilise that and train that. And then when we do become stressed, we can say, okay, we've got this, we know how to sleep, we've got a sleep pattern. That sleep pattern is as much a behavioural learned pattern as everything else we do in high performance. If we don't have a healthy sleep pattern in normal times, then we can't expect to have a really healthy sleep pattern in stressful times. So that includes things like having a frequent sleep time, what time you go to bed at night, having a sleep pattern.
What is it you do to go to bed at night? Now, you've all heard about getting off devices before you go to bed. And the blue light issues, well, of course they're correct. Getting off of your mobile devices, not watching too much TV, not being overly stimulated before you go to sleep just makes logical sense. And that's not what I'm here to talk to you about, because we've all been taught those things. But having a journal before you go to bed that looks at things that you can acknowledge, yeah, training today was really good. I hit this, I hit that. This is really good to me. These are things that didn't work. But you know what? I've got a strategy to deal with those tomorrow that again, allows your brain to not go into that fight or flight mechanism and to turn around and go, yeah, all right, I've got this. It forms another layer to our performance framework. We also want to do a lot of recognition and reward. We want to increase our serotonin, because what that does do is it dampens down our cortisol. When we dampen down our cortisol and it's less stimulated, less on high alert, then we're less likely to dump high degrees of cortisol in our brain during our restful sleep.
There's another part to this that we want to be aware of from a physiological component. When we go to sleep at night, the first part of our brain that shuts down is our critical thinking capacity, our prefrontal cortex. This is our logical part of our brain. This is the thing that comes up with our strategies and understands what's going on around us. It can normalise that data to go, yeah, I've done enough today so that, you know what? I'm okay. When that part of our brain shuts down, first it leaves our subconscious, our imagination unchecked. And that's often why we think of amazingly diverse things under pressure just before we go to sleep. It’s why we have such diverse and obscure dreams, it's because our prefrontal cortex is no longer keeping us in check. And so if this is a normal part of our sleep cycle, the first parts of our brain that go to sleep is the guards in the guard house, then we can't change that. But what we can do is give better constraints and boundaries to our imagination. And we can manage that by pre acknowledging some of the challenges we're thinking about.
If it's something that we haven't done, if we're not prepared, we need to do more of before the competition, then acknowledging that and saying, okay, I know I've not hit this, this and this, I'm aware of that, I've got that and I've put a strategy in place to be able to address that. I've got three days left before the competition. On day three and two, I'm going to nail those things. So the second we can do that, our brain is going to say, okay, I don't have to imagine the worst case scenario. You've identified it and you've got a strategy to manage it. So therefore, all good, we've got this. So journaling becomes a critical part of our nightly routine because not only does it allow us to acknowledge what's working, it also allows us to acknowledge what's not working yet. And so we know sleep is critical to us. And in actual fact, as we've gone on and been told all of the horror stories of what could go wrong to us long term, we've prioritised sleep way more than we would ever have done. And I think that is a good thing. However, highlighting it and raising it is important doesn't necessarily teach us the strategies.
And the strategies we need to learn need to be the ones that work specifically for us. Not every strategy is going to work for everybody. So take myself. I never have an issue going to sleep. In actual fact, I think more often than not, as soon as my head hits a pillow, I'm out. Where my challenges come in has always been within an hour, an hour and a half, I'm wide awake. It's like my brain's gone, 'Right, you've had the minimum amount of sleep that you need. Now wake up and deal with this.' That's unique to me. Or maybe not. That might be you too. Some people just can't go to sleep. They get in bed and the second the lights go out, they start to ruminate and think and overthink. If that's you, then the frustration is you're not getting any sleep, your brain hasn't prioritised an urgency it's said, 'You're not getting any sleep at all.' And many of us reach for our devices. Think about, I'll read something on my phone or I'll jump on my iPad and I'll do some research. Or you know what, I'm going to go back on my journal and I'm going to start reading through that online.
All of these increase your stimulation and when they increase stimulation, they reintroduce dopamine into your brain and when it should be shutting down. And we know that jumping on devices before we go to bed is problematic. Jumping on devices when we can't sleep is just compounding. So that compounding effect of I can't sleep, I'm ruminating, I'm overthinking, and now I'm stimulated makes going to sleep all that more impossible. So discipline, structure, strategy, recognition and reward, and most importantly, chemistry is what we need to be focusing on. Are the things that we need to have a better understanding of that are unique to you. What makes you feel like you have done enough? What metrics do you need to recognise? I am ready. I've done everything I need to do. I visualise my performance countless times, I've visualised my competition countless times. I know what I'm doing. I've been there. Even though I've not done it yet, I've been there. The last component I want to talk about is what we call bounce in, bounce out, and you've probably heard me talk about this in previous podcasts, and that's if you've got a competition or an event over multiple days, because you might nail it on day one, but come day two, you're now worrying about backing it up.
The strategy here is no different. That recognition, that reward, that structure, that preparation, that acknowledgement. But also what we want to do here is take one lesson from day one. What did I learn today when I competed so well? What do I need to take into tomorrow? And what's one thing I can focus on to improve? When we have these kind of structural strategies that our brain is still thinking forward, still planning for the next event, then we're not focused on what could go wrong, we're focused on what we need to do to make it go right. So sleep. As much as it's been my nemesis throughout my life, I think I'm in a good place. I think I've utilised the strategies that I teach well enough now to manage my own sleep. Am I an eight hour a night guy? No, I'm not. But I'm no longer a two hour a night guy either. I found that happy medium for me that when I'm not stressed I get a good night's sleep. But when I am stressed, I've got a really healthy management process that allows me to still function efficiently, effectively and most importantly, healthily.
So I hope you've got a lot from this focus on sleep and the strategies we put in place that are not tricks, they're not gimmicks, they work with the chemistry of your own brain. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart, enjoy the ride and sleep well. My name's Dave Diggle.
