Abstract
Objectives
In sports, decreased sleep duration is generally associated with poorer performance
compared to adequate or enhanced sleep duration. Yet, these findings have primarily
been taken from small numbers of athletes performing outside of real games or competitions.
It remains unknown how acute decreased sleep duration impacts real-game performance
among professional athletes. Here, we merged 2 publicly available datasets to jointly
measure late-night social media activity (a proxy for sleep deprivation) and next-day
game performance.
Setting
Professional basketball competition.
Participants
112 players from the National Basketball Association.
Measurements
Time-stamped social media activity and in-game individual performance statistics.
Results
Late-night tweeting (compared to not late-night tweeting) is associated with within-person
reductions in next-day game performance, including fewer points scored and fewer rebounds.
However, we also observe less time played per game following late-night tweets and
decreases in the negative outputs of turnovers and personal fouls. The critical measure
of shooting accuracy – which is not time dependent – provides the clearest evidence
of a performance penalty following late-night tweeting activity (between 11:00 pm and 7:00 am); players successfully make shots at a rate 1.7 percentage points less following
late-night tweeting.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that acute sleep deprivation, as measured via late-night Twitter
activity, is associated with changes in next-day game performance among professional
National Basketball Association athletes. More broadly, the use of late-night social
media activity may serve as a useful general proxy for sleep deprivation in other
social, occupational, and physical performance-based contexts.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: November 19, 2018
Accepted:
September 11,
2018
Received in revised form:
August 14,
2018
Received:
June 6,
2018
Identification
Copyright
© 2018 National Sleep Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
