Sleep and Sport: How Sleep-Deprivation Impacts Coaches and Teams

This sports psychiatry discussion centered on a meaningful gap in the sports psychiatry literature and proposed a bidirectional model linking coach sleep health to team performance outcomes. Authors discussed the inspiration behind their latest article for Psychiatric Times, “Leadership Under Pressure: Coach Sleep, Decision-Making, and Team Functioning in Elite Sport.”

While sleep protocols for athletes have become established across professional leagues, Derek Suite, MD, observed that analogous frameworks for coaches were virtually absent from both clinical practice and the published literature. He argued that coaches warrant dedicated attention given their outsized influence on a team's emotional climate, decision-making culture, and capacity to navigate pressure. Suite identified 3 distinct patterns of sleep impairment relevant to this population: acute sleep deprivation, chronic partial sleep restriction, and sleep disruption superimposed upon those conditions. He characterized chronic partial sleep restriction—defined as habitually sleeping fewer than 7 hours—as the most prevalent pattern, describing it as insidious in its accumulation.^1,2 Suite emphasized that sleep-impaired coaches demonstrated deficits in neurocognitive function, emotional regulation, and communication, noting that impaired "cognitive flexibility has downstream effects for how a team is going to handle pressure," given that players rely on coaches to make sound decisions in high-stakes moments.

Roy Collins, MD, MPH, situated coach sleep within the biopsychosocial framework, emphasizing sleep as a marker with the capacity to significantly affect interpersonal dynamics within a team structure. Mena Mirhom, MD, drew a parallel to adolescent psychiatry: just as clinicians must attend to the family system surrounding a young patient, improving athlete wellness cannot be meaningfully pursued in isolation from the coaching environment. The article and its accompanying conceptual model are intended to generate hypotheses and establish a formal research agenda in this underexplored domain.

Dr Suite is an adjunct clinical professor of psychopharmacology at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dr Mirhom is past president of the New York County Psychiatric Society, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, a Forbes contributor, and chief wellbeing officer at Athletes for Hope.

Dr Collins is a sports psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

References

1. Banks S, Dinges DF. Behavioral and physiological consequences of sleep restriction. J Clin Sleep Med. 2007;3(5):519-28.

2. Reynolds AC, Banks S. Total sleep deprivation, chronic sleep restriction and sleep disruption. Prog Brain Res. 2010;185:91-103.