J. George
To sleep or not to sleep? This is the difficult question faced each night by many athletes, students, and busy adults. While some opt for the “all-nighter” strategy, others trade just a few hours of sleep each night for work, practice, or homework believing that it is less harmful to their performance. Some people claim to thrive with less than seven hours of sleep each night. According to research by Dinges et al, less sleep prevents people from performing their best. While sleep affects several different aspects of our well-being, mental focus is one of the most significant areas of performance that is stagnated by sleep deprivation.
During the study, 16 test subjects were instructed to sleep 4, 6, or 8 hours each night for 14 days. Each day the test subjects performed an alertness test to determine the effects of each amount of sleep restriction throughout the 14-day period. During the test, subjects reacted to two different visual stimuli by pressing a different key for each stimulus. Their performance was measured by the number focus lapses that occurred during the 10-minute test. Lapses were counted when a subject failed to react within 500 msec. The lapses are thought to represent perceptual, processing, or executive failures in the central nervous system. (Abad et al)**. At the end of the 2 weeks, the subjects in the 6h sleep group had approximately 8 more lapses than the 8h group, and the 4h group had 15 more lapses than the 8h group. This experiment showed that small amounts of sleep loss over time decreases one’s ability to focus. Some may claim that chance could cause the change in lapses for the 6h and 8h groups, but the p-value of 0.0001 for both the 6h and 8h groups refute this argument, showing with 99.99% confidence that these results are significant.
Sleep is a vital component in one’s ability to focus. The data show that sleep deprivation, even if only a couple hours each night, decreases alertness. This could have ramifications for a daily task such as driving, which requires quick and efficient reactions. For an athlete, this lapse in attention could be the difference in winning or losing. While it may seem like sleep is the easiest part of the day to sacrifice for work, the sacrifice may come at a higher cost than originally thought. The best alternative to missing sleep is to optimizing your time at the beginning of the week to ensure you get to bed on time so you can perform your best.
*Dinges, David et al. Behavioral and Physiological Consequences of Sleep Restriction 2007.
**Abad, Vivien et al. Polysomnographic Evaluation of Sleep Disorders 2012.