Sport Psychology Books - Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker PhD
About the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker PhD
“Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories. It does so each and every night. While we are awake, the brain is constantly acquiring and absorbing novel information, intentionally or otherwise...”
In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I needed to do research on the science of sleep and how it impacts athlete mental performance outcomes. There are many excellent research papers and resources that were available to use. But perhaps one of my favorite pieces of literature on this subject was the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, the Director of its’ Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.
Because this book had such a tremendous influence on both my writing and my work with athletes, I wanted to take some time to review this book. In part I. I will explore why Matthew Walker’s book is so relevant for athletes. I will highlight the both the plot and science of the book. In part II. I will review how Walker’s book connects to athlete performance outcomes. Finally, I will explore applied strategies athletes and coaches can take away from Why We Sleep. With that being said, let’s dive into what this book is actually about.
Part I. Why Matthew Walker’s Book Matters For Athletes
Per the book bio: Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remained elusive. An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity. Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage?
Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book. Just after reading this excerpt, athletes, coaches, and exercise science professionals should be able to clearly recognize the need to read this book immediately. In my opinion, Why We Sleep offers the general public invaluable insight on sleep in the same way The Body Keeps the Score did on trauma. If this short excerpt isn’t enough to intrigue athletes into reading this book, then let’s consider another area where this book can help athletes excel in mental performance: learning. An athlete’s ability to learn pre, intra and post competition is critical towards their success. Why We Sleep offers us simple, yet incredible insight into how sleep helps with this. Let’s dive more into how the book reviews this.
Part II. Important Takeaways From Why We Sleep
The following excerpt explains the connection between sleep and learning: Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories. It does so each and every night. While we are awake, the brain is constantly acquiring and absorbing novel information (intentionally or otherwise). Passing memory opportunities are captured by specific parts of the brain. For fact-based information - or what most of us think of as textbook-type learning, such as memorizing someone’s name, a new phone number, or where you parked your car - a region of the brain called the hippocampus helps apprehend these passing experiences and binds their details together. A long, finger-shaped structure tucked deep on either side of your brain, the hippocampus offers a short-term reservoir, or temporary information store, for accumulating new memories. Unfortunately, the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, almost like a camera roll or, to use a more modern-day analogy, a USB membory stick. Exceed its capacity and you run the risk of not being able to add more information or, equally bad, overwriting one memory with another: a mishap called interference forgetting.
How then, does the brain deal with this memory capacity challenge? Some years ago, my research team wondered if sleep helped solve this storage problem by way of a file-transfer mechanism. We examined whether sleep shifted recently acquired memories to a more permanent, long-term storage location in the brain, thereby freeing up our short-term memory stores so that we awake with a refreshed ability for new learning. We began testing this theory using daytime naps. We recruited a group of healthy young adults and randomly divided them into a nap group and a no-nap group. At noon, all the participants underwent a rigorous session of learning (one hundred face-name pairs) intended to tax the hippocamps, their short-term memory storage site. As expected, both groups performed at comparable levels. Soon after, the nap group took a ninety-minute siesta in the sleep laboratory with electrodes placed on their heads to measure sleep. The no-nap group stayed awake in the laboratory and performed menial activities, such as browsing the internet or playing board games. Later that day, at 6 PM, all participants performed another round of intensive learning where they tried to cram yet another set of new factors into their short-term storage reservoirs (another hundred face-name pairs). Our question was simple: does the learning capacity of the human brain decline with continued time awake across the day and, if so, can sleep reverse this saturation effect and thus restore learning ability?
Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at 6 PM was not small: a 20% learning advantage for those who slept. Having observed that sleep restores the brain’s capacity for learning, making room for new memories, we went in search of exactly what it was about sleep that transacted the restoration benefit. Analyzing the electrical brainwaves of those in the nap group brought our answer. The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the short, powerful bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindles, noted in chapter 3. The more sleep spindles an individual obtained during the nap, the greater the restoration of their learning when they woke up. Importantly, sleep spindles did not predict someone’s innate learning aptitude. That would be a less interesting result, as it would imply that inherent learning ability and spindles simply go hand in hand. Instead, it was specifically the change in learning from before relative to after sleep, which is to say the replenishment of learning ability, that spindles predicted. So what are some applied strategies that athletes can take from reading Matthew Walker’s book to enhance their sleep performance in order to maximize their recovery and athletic outcomes?
Part III. The Connection Between Sleep & Athlete Peak Mental Performance
Dr. Walker not only provides us with scientific insight into sleep, he also gives readers specific applied strategies athletes (and non-athlete readers) can use to improve their sleep performance. The author states some of the following examples: Stick to a sleep schedule. got to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it.
There are many other incredible points of information that Matthew Walker reviews in his book, and I strongly encourage folks reading this edition of the Notes to buy his book. For my work with athletes, this book helped me not only better understand the brain, but also how to think about recovery and sleep performance differently. For instance, many of the professional racecar drivers I work with frequently have to travel to different time zones, multiple times for different races. Understanding the information in Why We Sleep has helped me provide better advice for how my athletes can maximize on their sleep, which in turn will maximize on their performance. I also review these strategies in my new book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, which I highly encourage people to go check out!
