You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Stealing sleep: is sport or society to blame?
  1. Shona L Halson
  1. Correspondence to Dr Shona L Halson, Department of Physiology, Australian Institute of Sport, Belconnen, Australian Capital Territory 2616, Australia; shona.halson{at}ausport.gov.au

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2015-094961

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Sleep debt negatively impacts the daily lives of both athletes and the general population at large. Elite athletes sleep less and have poorer estimated sleep quality than non-athletes.1 With sleep being vital for psychological and physiological functioning, why do we neglect such a critical biological function? For athletes, is reduced sleep a function of the elite athletes’ unique lifestyle or is our modern lifestyle generally the primary contributing factor?

    Why we should devote a third of our life to sleep

    As sleep has an influence on nearly all molecular, cellular, physiological and neurological functions,2 it would seem that sleep should be one of the foundations of an athlete’s training programme. Sleep deprivation can influence athletic performance, cognition, reaction time, immune function and pain perception,3 but it appears that scientists have only recently started to give research in athletes sleep the attention it deserves. …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles