Are Elite Athletes Sacrificing Their Wellbeing for Performance? — with Mohamed Romdhani

I'm going to start with a question: Why do we sleep? Let's start with mental health.

So on several studies showed that the quality of, uh, sleep predicts mental health in youth athlete.

Let's start with athlete.

And, uh, it explains the variability of scores of negative emotions such as, uh, depression, anxiety, and stress.

So sleep restriction can have significant impact on both, you know, on emotional regulation.

When sleep is, uh, insufficient, the, so the brain become less efficient in regulating, uh, emotional response.

And we also see that even increase in negative emotion such as irritability, easily stressed, and we also remark that sleep restriction, PSD, it's for partial sleep de- deprivation.

So PSD increase the negative emotion and, uh, the perception of effort, the perceived exertion.

So when athletes sleep restricted, they feel the exercise harder.

Even with the, the same amount of physical demand, the, the exercise seem- Seems more difficult or the, the athletes are more, uh, exerted by the same amount of exercise.

So when talking about interaction between the brain and the cognitive function, so when, yeah, we are awake, uh, our brain continues to receive information from everywhere, kind, uh, information that have to be processed from multiple sources.

And this co- constant flow of cognitive and sensory input requires the, the brain to analyze, integrate this information, this incoming, uh, signal, to create and modify neural connection.

As a result, the brain activity remain energetically demanding throughout, uh, the day.

That's why we need sleep.

So sleep provides essential period reducing this cognitive load.

It, uh, prevents saturation of, uh, neural, uh, circuits, and it allow the formation of new, uh, memory, especially for young athlete where they are learning a new technical skill, for example.

So sleep consolidate the memory and formation.

And when we say even the daytime sleep, so there are a few number of study that study the effect of napping, one hour or 30 minutes nap on memory consolidation.

They found that, uh, even a short daytime sleep or even a short nap of 30 minute of one... or one hour enhances the capacity of the brain to consolidate the new learned technique.

The brain, so, uh, like any other organ, uh, produce waste whenever it's metabolically active.

So this amount of brain toxin that, uh, need to be, uh, eliminated.

So when we are awake, as we said, so the brain collect information and process, regulate all kind of sources.

So this, um, needs energy, and by consuming a high amount of energy, so we have to...

So when we say higher energy consumption, we say a high metabolic waste, uh, production.

So, and it has been recently found that these metabolic waste are essentially eliminated during sleep, so by the, the glymphatic system.