Neuro Athletics #18

Sleep loss impedes decision making and increases experience of pain

August 29, 2021

This newsletter is brought to you by

Hi, Neuro Athletes! 

Here is your Sunday newsletter – a collection of the latest scientific research about brain performance, sleep physiology and lifestyle.

Learn how;

  • Sleep loss impedes decision making in crisis

  • Time-Restricted Feeding improves athletic performance

  • Sleep loss increases the experience of pain

Coming up this week in Tuesday’s newsletter;

  1. Deep dive into the ‘anatomy of losses’ - what happens to the brain when you experience a major loss?

  2. I interviewed Luis V. Sanchez and Jonathan J. Marcus on wins, losses, managing risk and how they manage their health to be able to perform at their peak.

So be sure to subscribe to stay up to date on all the news!

Sleep loss impedes decision making in crisis, research shows

The difference between life and death on the basketball court, trading room, operating room or during a police shootout often comes down to the ability to adapt to the unexpected. Sleep deprivation may make it difficult to do so. According to this article, a laboratory experiment that simulates how sleep loss affects critical aspects of decision making in high-stakes, real-world situations was conducted.

"Our findings tell us that putting sleep-deprived people in perilous environments is an inherently risky business and raises a number of medical, legal and financial implications”

Time-Restricted Feeding improves athletic performance

The results from this study indicate that adherence to four weeks of a time-restricted feeding regimen, (i.e., TRF with 16 h of fasting and 8 h of feasting), can be used in combination with regular training to improve athletic performance.

Caveat?

You cannot expect results in one week. In fact, the authors of the study state “no adaptation occurred after one week of TRF. Thus, when aiming at improving supramaximal motor performance with TRF, emphasis should be placed on prescribing diet interventions > one week”

Sleep loss increases the experience of pain

We kind of already know in general, clinically, that when someone is feeling sleep deprived or having trouble with things like that, we know that they are usually, to more likely, to feel more on edge and anxious.

Well, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, published in The Journal of Neuroscience explains why.

In this study, the researchers found that sleep deprivation expands the temperature range for classifying a stimulus as painful, specifically through a lowering of pain thresholds. 

“We show that sleep deprivation enhances pain responsivity within the primary sensing regions of the brain's cortex yet blunts activity in other regions that modulate pain processing, the striatum and insula. We further establish that even subtle night-to-night changes in sleep in a sample of the general population predict consequential day-to-day changes in pain (bidirectionally)”

You can read more about sleep and performance in Julys report here

Tired of biased news? 1440 has you covered.

According to Gallup, 51% of people can’t think of a news source that reports the news objectively. That's a real problem — one that our friends at 1440 are on a mission to tackle.

1440 scours over 100+ media sources ranging from culture and science to sports and politics creating one email that gets you all caught up on the day’s events — in 5 minutes or less.1440 gives you all the info you need to be aware of for the day, without the opinion or bias that's become commonplace. 

Happy Sunday !

If you have information you would like to share please contact me at [email protected]