How does poor sleep affect student athlete mental health?

It’s said that you spend about one-third of your life sleeping, which makes sense because if you sleep eight hours a night, that’s one-third of your day. In reality, we all have different sleep patterns. Some of us require more sleep and some of us just have a hard time sleeping altogether. A lack of sleep can cause issues with things like concentration, irritability, and decision-making, but how can sleep affect student athlete mental health?

New Study on Sleep and Student Athlete Mental Health

The results of a recent study looked at the relationship between insufficient sleep and mental health symptoms in collegiate student athletes and non-athletes. It’s long been recognized that a lack of sleep or poor quality sleep can impact one’s mental health. However, this study sought to examine the affects on athletes vs. non-athletes.

There were two basic points of assessment:

1. Each student was asked to document insufficient sleep, which was assessed as number of nights that the student felt that he or she did not “get enough sleep so that you felt rested when you woke up.”
2. Mental health symptoms were also assessed. Students were asked if over the last 30 days, they experienced feelings of hopelessness, overwhelm, exhaustion, loneliness, sadness/depressed mood, difficulty functioning, anxiety, anger, desire to self-harm, suicide ideation.

What the study found was that both athletes and non-athletes experienced similar mental health symptoms (as described above) when they felt they received insufficient sleep.

While the results are not surprising, what it does reiterate is that qualify of sleep often affects mental wellness and that athletes are not immune to these issues.

Here’s what else we know about student-athletes and sleep:

In an article on sleep disorders on ncaa.org, the author noted that the average American adult reports about two nights of insufficient sleep per week compared to student-athlete reports of four nights of insufficient sleep per week (American College Health Association). Furthermore, “an NCAA study showed that one-third of student-athletes get fewer than seven hours of sleep per night, with greater values among women.”

Why do student athletes get less sleep?

Think for a moment about the average student athlete’s life. They have a full-time class schedule, coursework, sports practice (sometimes multiple times a day), physical training (again, sometimes multiple times a day), team travel, plus sometimes stress such as financial strains, family relationships, future plans, and a social life to maintain. And that’s really just the start. Not only are their schedules packed and demanding, their bodies are often depleted, and their minds are often overloaded.

How can we help student athletes?

While we can’t change their schedules or their responsibilities, what we can do is offer a support system.

Here’s what that might look like:

• Help them get organized and create a schedule. This might not be so easy during the seasons of his or her respective sport because their schedule is likely erratic, however, we can teach them how to organize and schedule their responsibilities to be as balanced as possible.
• Give them a place to vent. Sometimes just having someone to listen can ease stress and therefore improve sleep.
• Teach mindfulness to aid in focus and clarity. Being in the moment and focused on one task at a time can save a ton of mental energy.
• Educate them on emotional intelligence so that the student-athlete can understand their emotions better and therefore know how to express them as well as handle them.
• Guide them on how to prepare the mind and body for sleep by establishing a routine such as setting a bedtime timeframe and disconnecting from electronics for at least an hour before sleep. This will help train the body to know when it’s time to rest and also to help train the mind to unwind and disconnect.
• If sleep is an ongoing issue, direct them to a specialist at the university or elsewhere.

Just because student athletes are young, that doesn’t mean that they need less sleep or are exempt from the mental health effects of poor sleep. Keep in mind that the chemistry of each of our bodies is different, and this includes the brain. To improve athlete mental health, we have to treat the individual holistically looking at all of the varying factors at play in the person’s life as objectively as possible and this includes getting enough ZZZ’s.