Ian O’Riordan: Lessons in sporting pillow talk and sleeping your way to the top

It was way past midnight, the Eagles and the Chiefs still tossing about for that lead going into the fourth quarter, the last of the cannoli and espresso martini mix gone down the hatch. It was probably time for bed.

Only no wasting in this house. The central heating was boosting again from the half-time show, the rooms simmering, and there was some 90 per cent dark chocolate left which came to bed too. There, careful not to disturb any more nocturnal peace, the fourth quarter played out under the pillow and on my phone, earphones in while occasionally checking what Twitter was saying.

Oh contemporary sleep evangelists forgive me.

Even if only the crazy once-off subversion as last Sunday’s Super Bowl, this is the exact regimen which tears up every single rule in the book of a good night’s sleep. You don’t need to understand everything about melatonin levels or circadian rhythms or REM to know all the above – the incandescent light, the above room temperature, the booze and sugar and caffeine – are best of enemies approaching the land of nod.

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“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” Charlotte Brontë once wrote, and she knew what she was on about. Any lack of respect for our nightly repose can have repercussions, some more dangerous than you might think, to our health and society and turns out inside the sporting arena too. If you care about your five-a-day you also should your eight-a-night – as in hours in bed and preferably asleep.

What do Patrick Mahomes, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Michael Phelps, Virgil van Dijk, Conor Murray and Fintan McCarthy have in common?

They’re among our now leading contemporary sleep evangelists, who may not have slept their way to the top of their game but certainly claim it’s keeping them there. They’re also either invested in or brand ambassadors for Whoop, the sleep and fitness tracker which is worn around the wrist or bicep with no face and little interest in the daytime.

Whoop is more about the night, about rest and recovery, acting as your own personal sleep coach, telling you via the supporting App how much sleep you got versus how much sleep your body needed. It’s not quite as fancy as the Oura Ring or busy as the Fitbit; it is making the once elite-only sleep coach available to all.

McCarthy was singing Whoop’s praises after winning another European rowing title with Paul O’Donovan last August, arriving in Munich perfectly rested and recovered after sleeping a whopping nine hours and 10 minutes the night before. After Sunday’s Super Bowl, Whoop were saying Mahomes was so well primed to perform he hit a max day-strain of 20.7, the equivalent of running a marathon (however vague that sounds).

That’s assuming you want to know: my sample device, kindly supplied by Whoop several weeks ago, is still sitting on the wine table untouched. There is no night owl mode.

Still, if more elite athletes are waking up to the importance and value of a good night’s sleep, others have been preaching and prescribing it for years. None more than Matthew Walker, the British neuroscientist and now director of Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

His international best-seller Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, published in 2017 after four and a half years research, is properly eye-opening on the subject. Walker isn’t just convinced a complete night’s kip can make us smarter, more attractive, slimmer, happier and healthier, he also believes it can ward of cancer and heart disease and possibly even dementia too.

[ Conor Meyler: Meditation, cold baths, stretching, and taping my mouth ]

A sleep consultant to the NFL, NBA and Premiership football teams, he also claims two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep. Drop below seven hours, he says, and the immune system starts to ail, in turn a cause of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart value. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he quotes the old maxim, and you will, maybe sooner than if you’d slept well when alive.

Humans, he adds, are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep, even if “it is difficult to imagine any other state, natural or medically manipulated, that affords a more damaging redressing of physical and mental health at every level of analysis.” In contrast, adequate sleep reforms the body’s metabolic state, and is “intimately tied to the fitness of our cardiovascular system, lowering blood pressure while keeping our hearts in fine condition”.

Aristotle called sleep “a privation of waking”, while “men who sleep badly”, according to Bertrand Russell, “are always proud of the fact.” Insomnia, Walker writes, is a whole other realm of disrupted sleep pattern, a clinical disorder, commonly associated with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, the triggers being stress, worry, anxiety.

Some elite athletes, in contrast, aren’t content with just their eight-a-night: the early afternoon nap, another repose favoured among distance runners, has long been hailed as a recovery tool, providing an extra shot of human growth hormone which might otherwise have only been attained by illegal means.

Oscar Wilde always said the most frightening sentence in the English language is “I had a very interesting dream last night.” Vladimir Nabokov had little time for that fraternity of sleep either, although he did believe in dreams, occasionally using them as inspiration, as did Paul McCartney, who had the idea for Let It Be after a dream he had about his mother during the tense sessions for the White Album.

Herein lies perhaps the best way of sleeping your way to the top, in the sporting arena or elsewhere. Walker makes a strong case for that period of REM sleep – characterised by rapid eye movement, during which most dreaming takes place – and not just for its vital role in our mental health.

“During REM, the flow of the anxiety-triggering brain chemical noradrenaline is shut off, allowing us to revisit distressing real-life events in a neurochemically calm environment ... a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity”.

Dreaming, in other words, can help us master new skills, practice a task which can prove every bit as helpful as doing so when we are awake. Ever dream of passing that winning touchdown in the Super Bowl? Is that dream of someday running a marathon still alive?

Dream it again, only this time for real, just make sure you got to bed in good time for it.