Insomnia Before a Big Game: Can we force sleep when performance matters?!

Regardless of your insomnia I'm sure there have been times in your life where you had a big game (or an exam) the next day and before you know it your mind has decided to make sleep impossible for that night.

This is a fairly common "trigger" for athletes in general but if you're a driven athlete with insomnia then that will of course be extremely triggering.

When this happens to someone who normally doesn't have any issues sleeping it can be helpful to see it as they are experiencing almost a low grade dose of insomnia.

This is because their brain (much like someone who suffers from chronic insomnia) has labeled losing sleep as a threat because this individual cares about performance. This threat turns into pressure, which creates struggle to fall asleep which isn't helpful.

Normally most people don't think much of it and the next day they get back to normal sleep. It only really becomes full fledged insomnia when the person maintains that unhelpful labeling and chooses to continue to fight for sleep which paradoxically makes sleep worse.

Please note: This article is educational and not a substitute for medical care.

Why insomnia can happen before a big game

Almost any athlete worth their salt greatly cares about their performance and chances are does a great deal of homework about how to be at their best.

Inevitably during their research come to read that sleep is crucial.

This puts on a lot of self-imposed pressure and start to tell themselves the following stories:

• "If sleep doesn't happen, I won't play well tomorrow"

• "I need to figure out how to control this"

• "Last time I didn't sleep well I had a bad game"

Like I said before this is the sort of unhelpful dialogue that turns a normal temporary patch of sleep disruption into insomnia (or what continues to perpetuate already existing insomnia).

We have placed more and more of an importance on sleep and so it has become harder to happen.

Is 7 hours of sleep enough for sports?

Driven people love to stack the odds in their favor and they find comfort in quantifying their preparation.

• "I did 30 pushups every day for the past 2 months"

• "I ate 180 grams of protein yesterday and today"

Normally this is very helpful, but sleep is the one domain where that backfires.

When you say a story to yourself like "I NEED 7 hours or I'm not going to be able to perform well", you've given yourself a very unhelpful responsibility to perform under pressure at 2 a.m.

We might want to view this in a healthier way:

• 7 hours is a good night for many people, plenty of athletes would perform well on that.

• BUT the bigger performance killer is more often than not the stress and the struggle that's created when you don't hit the successful number.

Really it's the urge we give ourselves to fall asleep that's way more detrimental to our wellbeing and our performance than whether or not we get sleep.

One of the most helpful things we can develop to overcome insomnia is re-learning that it is OK to simply rest peacefully even when sleep is imperfect. Not only does this increase the chance of sleep happening to us but furthermore it diminishes that awful "hangover" effect.

Did Kobe really sleep for only 4 hours?

I don't know. What I do know is that it's very common for world class athletes to not get much sleep before a very high stakes game.

George St. Pierre for example, arguably the greatest MMA fighter of all time was almost never able to sleep before a big fight.

What's more helpful is to instead look at your sleep as maybe just one of many, many factors that determines your performance.

Whether or not you didn't sleep on a given night doesn't take away from the years of work you've put in, your talent, the support from your teammates, etc.

As time goes on you'll most likely find it more helpful to collect evidence that you can succeed and perform well even when you have less than perfect nights of sleep.

Practical takeaway:

If you start googling Kobe's sleeping habits as it gets closer and closer to bedtime, that's you seeking reassurance. It's perfectly normal to do that and we can take that as a sign that what we're so afraid of (not getting sleep for some time) might not be the end of the world. In fact the fear of not getting sleep and fighting for it might be hurting us more than not getting sleep.

The bottom line

Not being able to sleep before a game (especially if you're suffering from chronic insomnia) doesn't mean you're broken. You're having a perfectly normal human reaction to an unhelpful story that we've told ourselves. This can be unlearned.

Of course it's probably best to not drink a few cups of coffee an hour before bed or anything like that, but beyond that obvious course of action it's not going to be super helpful to really do anything to force sleep to happen. We didn't need to do this before our insomnia started, so why do we need to do it now?

The people who sleep the best, regardless of their athletic prowess aren't the ones with the perfect routine, they're just the ones whoa aren't afraid of a bad night.