As we discussed in our recent blog in which we explored resilience, we consider resilience is the maintenance of performance under adversity or stress. Resilience reflects a person-environment interaction, whereby how we interpret our circumstances and the skills we deploy to the demands we face impacts our resilience. In this section we will now move on to exploring what skills and strategies can be employed the day before competition to maintain and enhance resilience. We will focus on the crucial role that sleep plays – and also the psychological strategies that athletes have used to prepare psychologically, including journal keeping, imagery and writing strategies.
But first to sleep. It sounds somewhat counter-intuitive that the best way to prepare for the psychological demands and stresses of competition is to do nothing. But in many ways it is! Time after time the feedback from our athlete clients and a consistent body of research points to the effectiveness of sleep as a strategy to develop resilience. Of course it is a throwaway comment to say that to sleep is to do nothing. There is a tendency to view sleep as passive – doing nothing, whereas it is in reality an active process. One that brings about a whole range of positive physical and psychological benefits to a person. In his recent best-selling book – Why we Sleep - Dr Matthew Walker outlines sleep can help you live longer, enhance your memory, makes you more creative. It brings a number of health benefits including lowering the risks of heart attacks and stroke and can ward off colds and flu. Greater sleep will help you feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. These are just some of the benefits of sleep and from a sporting perspective there is a growing body of research that shows that athletes who sleep more have fewer injuries and miss fewer competitive matches. This relates to one of the important phases of sleep – deep sleep – where Human Growth Hormone is released – a key ingredient in repairing our bodies.
So how much sleep is enough? Well Dr Matthew Walker recommends around 8 hours a night. And one of the interesting things is that sleep has a number of different cycles. While each cycle is around 90 minutes you do have different proportions of deep sleep and REM sleep in each cycle with proportionally greater REM sleep in the cycles later in the sleep. REM is particularly important for memory as it is during REM and we strengthen connections of key memories and skills, such as motor skills. Because the different aspects of sleep serve different functions if you reduce sleep you miss out on crucial aspects. For example if you get 6 hours of sleep you are not just losing 25% of your sleep but 60% of your REM sleep because there is proportionally greater REM sleep later in the sleep.
In terms of resilience there is some research that shows that after a night of sleep deprivation the amygdala – a part of the brain involved in emotional processing was up to 60% more active then after a normal night’s sleep when processing emotionally negative pictures. Being sleep deprived changed the brain’s responses to negative images. We can think how this translates to our normal lives – any parent will know how a sleep deprived child can be a little emotional! But also parents who are sleep deprived will recognise of their mood and emotional responses can be a little more intense compared to times when they have had a full night’s sleep. What this study illustrates is that be rested means that our emotional response to demanding events is not as likely to be as strong. Being rested after a good night’s sleep can help make us more resilient.
So what are some tips to get a good night’s sleep? Well some things we know clients have found useful are the following:
First, give yourself a sufficiently large sleep window. This may sound obvious but it is interesting how often it is ignored. For example not matter how quickly you fall asleep going to bed at 12 if you have to get up at 6am does not give you enough time to get the likely amount of sleep you need. To address this it is sometimes helpful to work back from when you need to wake up – add the amount of sleep you need – then half an hour to fall asleep and that will give you the time you need to be getting into bed. For many people this time will be earlier then they normally go to bed!
Second have a pre-sleep routine. This means talking an hour, or at the very least 30 minutes. The purpose of this routine is to enable you to relax into sleep. So that you engage in activities that are relaxing and not stimulating. For example, stay off smartphones and tablets – in particular as smartphones and tablets display blue light which some people think can stimulate wakefulness. Do not go on social media or email as some posts or comments can stimulate strong emotions.Watching TV or reading a book is fine – something that allows you to relax and occupy your mind but is not too stimulating
A final tip is to be aware of your caffeine or alcohol intake. Caffeine has a half-life of around 7 hours and so even if you drink a cup of coffee at 5 o’clock in the afternoon half the caffeine will be in your system at midnight. Caffeine can make you feel more awake and harder to get to sleep. Alcohol on the other hand can help you fall asleep but as the body is breaking down the alcohol is the quality of the sleep can be affected and you do not get as good restful and rejuvenating night of sleep as you would if you do not drink alcohol. We are not advocating complete abstention – but merely suggesting that you increase your aearenss of how caffine and alcohol may impact the quality and quantity of your sleep.
We hope these simple, and practical strategies are helpful. There are many strategies to help you sleep better and we appreciate that we are only touching on them here. Relaxation techniques, such as mindfulness can be helpful for example. One factor that often keeps people awake are worries or concerns. Of course aspect that often keeps people awake is worry – and a commonly used strategy for helping people to deal with worries or concerns is to write them down. In our final strategy we outline how writing worries or concerns down can not only be useful in helping you sleep, but also be helpful in reducing anxiety about an upcoming competition and helping you prepare mentally for the upcoming competition.
To illustrate this we use the quote from formal England cricket captain Andrew Strauss, who said:
“On the night before every Test I will sit down for an hour or so and write some things down in my diary ... It is very important in that it helps me clear my mind and focus on what’s ahead. I will write down how I am feeling and what I have to try and do in order to score runs the following day ... You can get a bit bored in your hotel room, of spending so much time with the same people and you do have the odd low day. But by putting it down on paper I am almost putting it out of my mind. It is my way of dealing with it.”
This is a very good example of how writing things down can help you reduce anxiety the night a competition – you are recognising the worries you have and paying attention to them and not trying top suppress them. By then outlining how to address the worries you are increasing your sense of control and important factor in being resilient under pressure. So taking time to write down your concerns and how to address them is a very useful strategy.
Image by Rosy - The world is worth thousands of pictures from Pixabay
