Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep

by David K. Randall

  He brought up a chart on his computer. “As I sit here talking with you, the lead of the BMX national team just sent me the upcoming world championship schedule. Soon, we will send her a team travel plan back with everything they need to do from the minute they get on the plane to the minute that they compete,” he said.

  Samuels believes that bending an athlete’s circadian rhythm in preparation for competition will eventually usher in a new era of performance and sports training. “Ten years ago I would have been very reticent to say that light did this or that, but now we know that light improves alertness,” he said. “I was around in the sixties when Gatorade was invented, and this seems like it has the same potential to affect performance.”

  Thanks to Samuels, the Canadian Alpine Ski Team travels with fifteen to twenty light boxes, a type of oversized flat lamp that simulates natural sunlight. Once at the site of a competition, the athletes will eat breakfast while sitting in front of one of them. The light stabilizes the circadian rhythm and improves alertness. Many will also spend ten minutes in front of a light box immediately before a race, especially if they are competing when their circadian rhythm normally dips.

  Theoretically, this would improve their performance. I asked Samuels how one knows that the light strategy has worked in the real world.

  “You don’t,” he replied simply. “My job isn’t to sit here and take credit for wins because I worked with the teams. I never do that. These are athletes and they win and lose on their own.”

  Light improves the chances that athletes will compete at their peak no matter where or when the event takes place, he said. It is a form of sports training that isn’t about charting lost body fat, lifting heavier weights, or ingesting the latest supplement. The focus is instead on harnessing the body’s subtle rhythms so that an athlete doesn’t walk onto a playing field with an unseen handicap. Beyond that, anything can happen. In all sports, athletes competing at their maximum ability sometimes lose.

  But light is only part of how the circadian rhythm dictates athletic performance. The other part is actually getting athletes to sleep, which can be tougher than it sounds when they are constantly on the road. And perhaps no sport punishes athletes’ sleep schedules over such a long time as professional baseball.

  Fernando Montes has spent all of his adult life testing the limits of the human body. Unlike researchers in the military, he is not interested in the body’s ability to withstand extremes of hot or cold or how long someone can go without food. Montes’s interest in the body is limited to what makes it possible for one person to throw a baseball faster than another one.

  Not long after he graduated from college, he found himself working on the strength and conditioning crew for Stanford’s football team. After the team won its 1993 bowl game, Montes was offered a job as the strength coach for the pitching staff of the Cleveland Indians. The biggest change in jumping from football to baseball was the amount of time between one game and the next. The increased frequency of games radically altered Montes’s concepts of strength and endurance. In football, his job was to shape brute strength, crafting a team full of athletes strong enough to bring down or run over the guy on the other team. But in baseball, sheer physical size wasn’t as important as consistency. His new challenge was to train a pitcher’s body to be able to hurl a baseball at speeds often over ninety miles per hour, more than a hundred times a game—and then do it again four days later. Added to this was a grueling 162-game, six-month schedule that would often include two straight weeks crisscrossing the country. Making the playoffs or the World Series could add another month and a half to the schedule. “In football the whole environment of recovery is not really truly understood because it doesn’t need to be,” Montes told me. “You have more days to recover because you’re not playing everyday. It’s a big difference from baseball, basketball, and hockey. Baseball is the worst because you’re playing every night.”

  Schedules that feature six games in seven days make fatigue an unspoken part of baseball’s culture. For a long time, players relied on amphetamines for a game-time boost of energy. Pills became a part of baseball in the wake of World War II, when returning veterans facing a double header turned to the same drugs the military gave them for use during combat. When the drugs were banned before the 2006 season, players said that their absence would be noticeable immediately. “It’s going to have a lot bigger effect on the game than steroid testing,” Chipper Jones, the Atlanta Braves’ All-Star third baseman, said at the time. “It’s more rampant than steroids. . . . I think the fringe players will be weeded out.”

  For most coaches, the long season boils down to a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma. Resting a top player so that he can perform at a high level late in the season comes with the risk that the absence will result in a loss today. Recovery was something that sports trainers in the United States concerned themselves with on a superficial level by giving athletes ice packs and massages, but Montes saw that sleep was rarely a part of the conversation. This seemed crazy. A pitcher’s body won’t recover from the trauma of the last game in time for his next start without sleep, for a number of reasons. Some of them are physical. Sleep, for instance, is the time when the body sends growth hormones to repair damaged muscles. But pitching is unique because it isn’t only about muscle. Knowing the tendencies of your opponent—whether he will bite at a high curveball, how often he swings on the first pitch—is half of the battle. Without enough sleep, a pitcher might lose the ability to learn and analyze information that is vital to his success. A pitcher who isn’t getting enough sleep has already lost the mental battle that he fights every time he is on the mound.

  If carried out correctly, however, a schedule that emphasizes sleep could result in players who consistently play well. An athlete who can recover quickly creates an advantage that increases exponentially as the schedule gets longer, because it allows the best players to play in their top condition during the maximum number of games against progressively weaker rivals. If he could train players’ bodies to regularly perform at their peaks despite the schedule and without banned drugs, Montes would find one of the holy grails of baseball. But one of his first challenges was to find an answer to something that bothered him from the minute he stepped onto a baseball diamond.

  Pitchers, unlike other players on the field, aren’t judged on their foot speed, body strength, or any other standard test of physical ability. What makes a good pitcher isn’t the ability to throw a ball faster than anyone else. It is the ability to throw strikes that batters can’t hit. The result is a startling mix of body shapes. Yankee’s All-Star pitcher CC Sabathia, for instance, is known as one of the most durable pitchers in the league because of the high number of complete games he finishes each year. He accomplished these feats while weighing close to three hundred pounds. In 2011, he surprised sports writers by showing up at spring training twenty pounds lighter, but downplayed the rumor that he was on a more stringent workout routine. “I stopped eating Cap’n Crunch every day . . . I used to eat that stuff by the box,” he said. Sabathia, one of the top players in the league, was also one of the heaviest, and yet other top pitchers were tall and lanky. Age, too, seemed to have little effect on a pitcher’s effectiveness. The Boston Red Sox’s Tim Wakefield was forty-five at the start of the 2011 season, and already held the record for the oldest pitcher to ever play for the team. And yet he remained in the starting rotation on the strength of a knuckleball that rarely topped speeds of seventy miles per hour.

  Montes wanted to find out if there was a measure that could help him evaluate his pitchers on a common scale. “In baseball, they keep stats up the wazoo,” he told me. “So one of the first things I asked was, how can you tell me that a pitcher is in shape? Still to this day there isn’t an answer, and as far as I know it was never studied by anyone.” He turned to conversations he once had with sports trainers from the old Soviet Union who said that their tradition of emphasizing recovery time between events was an
overlooked aspect of their success. Sleep obviously affected performance, and yet that didn’t register within a sports world that often considers rest the sign of a soft athlete. Football’s so-called Hell Weeks, for instance, are notorious for players’ having to participate in full-contact drills twice a day for five days with little time for sleep or recovery. Yet this measure of toughness is deceiving. Surviving a Hell Week doesn’t mean that a player will maintain his strength over the course of a full season. An athlete who can recover faster between games, on the other hand, has a clear advantage over competitors still sore from the last contest.

  By the time Montes moved on from Cleveland to become the head strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, he had crafted a plan unique among professional sports trainers. From here on out, he decreed, his players would sleep. It was easier said than done. There was no controlling the travel schedule and the painful routine of arriving at hotels at three o’clock in the morning. So Montes set about searching for areas that he could control. He rounded up his pitchers and made each one record what time he went to bed, what time he woke up, and the quality of each night’s sleep on a five-point scale. Hoping to speed the transition of each player’s circadian rhythm to the time zone where the team was competing, Montes told pitchers to leave their curtains open when they went to sleep in their hotel rooms so that they would wake up with sunlight in their eyes. When one reliever seemed to be especially sleepy during home games, Montes cornered him. “Listen, I understand that on the road you like to go out at night. But at home, what’s the problem?” he asked. The pitcher replied that he had young children. Sleeping at home meant giving his wife a break from handling them on her own.

  Montes found himself armed with a rare accounting of his players’ bodies over twenty-four hours. But it wasn’t enough. He then decided that the pitching staff would report to the ballpark hours before everyone else. Pitchers arrived at the ballpark early, only to be told exactly when to take a nap and for how long based on the quantity and quality of their sleep over the past week. Like weight lifting, sleep became another part of training that required precision to be effective. “We had to teach them how to take a proper nap,” Montes told me.

  Proper naps were twenty minutes long, though each player was allotted thirty minutes to give him time to fall asleep. To make sure napping was easy, Montes set up an iPod to play what he describes as “relaxing meditation music” in a dark room. He made sure that a player’s hands and feet were covered with a blanket, and lectured each man about the importance of keeping warm while asleep. If the head coach wanted to find one of his pitchers in the afternoon before a night game, Montes would tell him that he would have to wait until the naptime was over. Few knew it at the time, but the starting pitchers of the Texas Rangers that season often prepared for games in a dark room in the bowels of the stadium, riding out the dip in their circadian rhythms with a nap.

  Baseball players, as a rule, are suspicious of experimenting with their training patterns. But after a week or so of the new sleeping routine, each player told Montes that he felt stronger and more energetic during games. Montes didn’t want to cause friction with other coaches on the team who scoffed at the idea that napping could craft a stronger ballplayer, so he asked that his pitchers keep their new schedules quiet. It soon spread anyway. “One thing about baseball—and it doesn’t matter if you’re a pitcher or a position player—if you’re successful, everyone wants to copy it,” Montes said.

  After one extra-innings game that went late into the night, the Rangers were packing up in the visitors’ locker room in Kansas City. A plane would take them to Minneapolis that night. They wouldn’t get into their hotel rooms until five the next morning. After less than ten hours at the hotel, team buses would arrive to shuttle them to the Metrodome for that night’s game against the Twins. Montes went from player to player, recommending that they sleep with their blinds open and plan on getting to the ballpark early the next day to take a nap. It was an experiment to see whether his techniques could make a difference beyond his small circle of pitchers.

  The Rangers essentially fielded two teams that night against the Twins. Players who didn’t nap were out of sequence, missing what should have been easy defensive plays and struggling to connect at the plate. Those who arrived early at the ballpark to get extra sleep, meanwhile, performed about as well as they did any other night, and they demonstrated few of the side effects of the long night of travel and the sleep deprivation that had accumulated from the grueling road trip. The recovery plan wasn’t enough to change the outcome of the ballgame—the Rangers lost that night—but the score was certainly closer than it would have been otherwise. The circadian rhythm wasn’t conquered, but it was tamed. For the rest of the season, Montes’s napping room was crowded.

  It is all well and good that athletes can throw baseballs faster and speed down mountains quicker because they mastered the circadian rhythm, you might be saying to yourself. But how does this relate to people whose lives don’t involve ball fields or coaches? The answer lies in one group that often spends several years of their lives in a constant state of sleep-deprived jet lag. They most likely live in your town, and may even sleep down the hallway from you. They go by a name coined less than eighty years ago: teenagers.

  Edina is a wealthy suburb that sits less than ten miles outside of Minneapolis. Corporate executives and white-collar workers choose to live there in large part because of the quality of its public schools. It didn’t seem like a place that would spark a radical change in education that still reverberates in school districts across the country. In the early 1990s, one of Edina’s school board members attended a medical conference. There, he listened in rapt attention to a sleep researcher describe how teenagers’ circadian rhythms differ from their parents’ and siblings’.

  Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at night and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise. Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. With all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep. Because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, asking a teenager to perform well in a classroom during the early morning is like asking him or her to fly across the country and instantly adjust to the new time zone—and then do the same thing every night, for four years. If professional football players had to do that, they would be lucky to win one game.

  The teenage circadian rhythm has become a problem only in the last hundred years. Teenagers before then were typically seen as young adults who worked to support the family, whether on the farm or in a trade apprenticeship if they lived in a city, and were given more control over their schedule. In 1900, only 8 percent of eighteen-year-olds had a high school diploma. By 1940, the proportion of high school graduates climbed to 30 percent, and by 1960 almost 70 percent U.S. teenagers finished high school. Although the quality of public education has vastly improved over that time, schools haven’t been as kind to the teenage body. Teenagers in the past were expected to spend part of their days in the classroom and then either work at an after-school job or complete a round of chores on the farm. To fit in time for both, the school day started as early as 7:00 a.m. This early start time remained constant despite sweeping cultural changes over the successive decades, including a sharp reduction in the percentage of young adults who work at an after-school job. Band practice, sports teams, drama club, and other activities that add to a college application have taken the place of paid employment for many teenagers.

  The teenage body hasn
’t kept up with the demands placed on it. A study by researchers at the University of Kentucky found that the average high school senior sleeps only six and a half hours each night, about three-fourths of what sleep researchers consider necessary for adolescents. Many students find themselves falling asleep in 7:00 a.m. classes no matter how early they try to go to sleep the night before. In one telling example of the impact of early start times, a researcher found that most students earned higher grades in classes that started later in the day for the simple reason that they were more likely to stay awake for the entire lesson.

  The lack of sleep affects the teenage brain in similar ways to the adult brain, only more so. Chronic sleep deprivation in adolescents diminishes the brain’s ability to learn new information, and can lead to emotional issues like depression and aggression. Researchers now see sleep problems as a cause, and not a side effect, of teenage depression. In one study by researchers at Columbia University, teens who went to bed at 10:00 p.m. or earlier were much less likely to suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts than those who regularly stayed awake well after midnight.

  Teenage sleep deprivation appears to be a uniquely American problem. One report found that the average high school in Europe starts at 9:00 a.m., and that far fewer students complain about not getting enough sleep. But back in Minnesota, the first bell at Edina’s high school rang at 7:25 a.m.

  That was when Edina’s school board proposed a solution that was radical in its simplicity. Since students who were awake were more likely to learn something than those who were asleep, the board decided to push the high school’s starting time an hour and five minutes later, to 8:30. It was the first time in the nation that a school district changed its schedule to accommodate teenagers’ sleeping habits. The response wasn’t what the board members expected. Some parents complained that the new schedule would take time away from after-school sports or school clubs. Others said that they needed their children home to babysit their siblings. Yet the most persistent complaint was that pushing the starting time back wouldn’t result in better-rested kids, but the opposite. Critics argued that teenagers would simply use the time to stay up even later, compounding the problem and making parents’ lives more difficult.