Learn how short sleep impacts communication in Ocean Racing. This blog is the rewritten manuscript for a special edition podcast for the 2023 Round Zealand Sailing Week.
Ocean Racing can be fun. It is a challenging and a great way to train and sharpen skills at sea while competing by gentleman rules. Sailing into the night days in a row however, ocean racing usually takes its toll on every participant. Tiredness sets in.
Commands tend to be shorter. They are less precise and perhaps lacking the required patience to ensure everyone feels appreciated for their effort.
Everybody will experience the effects of both acute and accumulated sleep loss.. This goes for the the leader of the pack finishing in 36 hours or less. And it goes for the rest of the field spending up to 72 hours crossing the finish line.
This will affect your cognitive level of functioning and how your team can stay motivated and keep performing through aversity.
My Name is Robert Benjamin Andersen. I’m a psychologist for 18 years with a expert reputation in sleep.
In this podcast I will talk about how you can understand and deal with sleep loss. I will also talk about strategies to counter act short sleep. I will address how the skipper can aspire to be role model and guide the crew’s attention. This will help keeping motivation and spirits high.
Understand the impact of short sleep:
So how does short sleep impact communication in Ocean Racing? Sleep is a state where the person is quiet, unresponsive to the surrounding environment. Typically laying down and being able to reverse this state to full alertness within seconds or at the minimum minutes.
The basics of sleep
Circadian rythm
Sleep is governed by our circadian rhythm. The wake period is odd 16 hours and a sleep period for 8 hours. The body autonomous nervous system awakens round 4 a.m.. Here it starts to produce alertness with wakefulness starting from 6 a.m. to 10 pm.
This also means that the body will be at its lowest point 4. a.m.. It is a known fact that most traffic accidents happen between 4 and 6 in the morning. Timing of sleep and wake may differ depending on your cronobiology. A lark rises early and goes to bed early. On the other hand an owl staying up late into the night and preferring to rise late.
Feeling sleepy is a response to the circadian rhythm releasing melatonin and ceasing to release high levels of cortisol in. This happens in the evening. In the morning however, this is reversed when cortisol levels rising driving arousal and attention for the coming day.
Tiredness is the experience of wastematerials in the brain
Tiredness is a result of time awake. Time awake produces several neurotoxins that build up in the brain. Primarily in the prefrontal cortex. This hampers neurotransmission and thereby our alertness, response rate, ability to plan and execute actions in the correct order.
When whe have been awake for more than 16 hours, our ability to motivate ourselves and stay aware of other people’s needs, will decline. Our need to sleep will create psychological pressures us to find a place where we can lie down and sleep. Behaviorally sleep is a process where we lay down, arequiet and disconnect from the environment for a while.
How much sleep does sailors need
Most people will need 7-8 hours of sleep on an average basis to maintain cognitive and emotional functioning. That said many will sleep somewhat less during the week and catch up in the weekend and experience no ill effects.
15% of the population though report in various polls that they do not get sufficient sleep due to work and family responsibilities, and in my experience perhaps have some questionable habits leading to sleep curtailment where short sleep becomes the norm. This will lead to accumulated sleep loss that have similar negative effects to cognition and emotional wellbeing as acute sleep loss.
Preparing for an ocean race this is an important thing to note, and the Skipper should request that crew do their best to show up with no accumulated sleep loss or acute sleep for race day. My advice is, that the crew should sleep as long as possible on raceday. This will delay the process of building up neurotoxins in the brain as long as possible.
This strategy work best with sleep cycles of at least 90 minutes should be prioritized letting the brain have a cycle of deep sleep and some REM sleep.
Keeping up performance and communication with short sleep
It’s a common know fact that best time of day for physical activity and performance is during late afternoon and early evening. In the morning our body is still building up arousal levels, and during the night arousal declines.
Another way to look at this, is to observe a relationship between arousal and performance on an X-Y plot. Yerkes Dawson model of performance assumes and inverted U relation between arousal levels and performance assuming an optimal zone of arousal for performance on a specific task.
Calm alertness
A crew must be alerted to upcoming tasks. But they should be able to execute them calmly and coordinated. That meas without undue stress or sudden exaggerated behavior.
Lack of sleep though will lead to “jittery responses” and exaggerated executions and difficulty on planning the correct order of tasks. This is because your body is stressed from the lack of sleep and prefrontal cortex is not functioning optimally. The brain will need help in guiding attention and staying motivated, confident and competent.
Skippers’ role is both to keep the crew alerted and primed to the next task, while at the same time avoiding stressing the crew to a point where skills and performance will decline.
Use the principles of Albert Bandura’s model of Self-Efficacy to mitigate the effects short sleep and communication.
Albert Banduras model of building self-efficacy can be inspiring for the skipper.
You can use this model to help your own or other peoples sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy and achievement happens when you experience tasks and goals can be executed with 100% certainty.
Thit means that goals and task should broke down into manageable and understandable actions. An successful executed task will result in a feeling of mastery. Successive mastery experiences build on each other and strengthens a belief of self-confidence.
Stride towards friendly communication in spite of short sleep
The second point is to utilize different skill levels among the crew and make certain everybody participates in passing on what they have learned in a friendly manner. This will help set expectations both on skills but also necessary attitudes and norms for performance on different levels of experience and skills.
Many skills in sports are tacit and best learned through observation and imitation. The more experienced crew therefor are important role models in passing on knowledge and skills.
This can be an important point to address continuously especially when the situation is tough and full of adversity, when tiredness, hunger or cold sets in. Shared goals that go beyond podium positions can help keep the crew – everybody should strive towards not just being a winner, but a champion.
Skipper should be champion of the crew in spite of short sleep
I often find inspiration in Muhammed Ali. His goal was to create a platform on which he could address black people’s rights a goal going much further than just winning the next fight. I would suggest that every skipper should communicate his or her goal on participating and winning and why this goal goes way beyond the finish line.
This leads to the third principle in building self-efficy. Feedback on task execution should always motivate to make yet another effort of mastery and build positive emotions of respect, concern and appreciation. Always make sure you complete successive attempts with “well done, try again!”.
Keep the crews energy and spirit in the necessary performance zone with positive communication
As a skipper you should also fokus on guiding the crew to “stay in the zone” both cooling off and warming up to a task. This is relevant both in a single-hand task, shorthanded or with a full crew. Peptalks help people warm up to the challenge, building up energy and focusing their attention on the task and the order in which to execute it . Afterwards appreciation is helpful to calm people down after maximum effort with high levels of adrenaline.
Controlled breathing is an excellent way to tell the body “I’m safe again – dangers over, I can calm down and refocus”.
Let me summarize. Everybody on board can help create an atmosphere of “seamanship and confidence” by setting tasks that are within peoples grasp to solve.
By being a role model both for task execution and team culture, motiving each other to keep trying and last helping each other building energy levels and calming down again.
The skipper can help guiding the crew’s behavior though observing these principles.
Guiding attention for communication during short sleep
When stress, cold, tiredness and exhaustion set in – attention narrow, skill levels decline and cognitive impairment for lack of sleep hampers concentration. In sport, this effect it also known as “choking”.
Choking can be counteracted by using Nideffers Model of Attention. A coach or skipper can guide the cew with a self-talk procedure. This also works for single-handled sailors. The Model of Attention Intuitively states, Attention can be either broad or narrow focusing internally or externally.
Plotted on two dimensions we get a grid with first “Broad External Focus” where we assess the situation based on our reading of the environment.
Second, we dive in “broad Internally” and analyze our options based on knowledge and experience.
Thirdly we narrow down internally and plan and prepare the order of actions we deem necessary and fourthly go narrow broadly again and execute the tasks at hand.
As a guiding principle, this can help staying focused and avoiding choking, by nudging our attention in the right direction. Use it as a framework to use between tactician, pitman, navigator and skipper to facilitate shared attention before tasks are executed.
Last remarks on how short sleep impacts communication
In this podcast, I have talked about the importance of sleep, both before a ocean race event to make sure the crew is not carrying sleep-debts on aboard as this will compile on the effects of prolonged wake-fullness that is an inevitable part of long distance ocean racing.
Prolonged wakefulness will have an impact on both cognitive and emotional resources. This is due to the circadian rhythm that regulates attention during the course of a day and a homeostatic buildup of neurotoxins. These can unly be cleared with processes that happens during sleep.
The negative effects of prolonged wakefulness can be somewhat off-set with sleep-cycles of 90 minutes. A “sleep-log” paying attention to total sleep time can help plan and time sailors cat naps during ocean racing.
Prolonged wakefulness will take its toll at some point for everybody. Paying attention to communication can help keep the crew feel motivated, appreciated and confident.
You accheive sports specific self confidence when four things happen:
- Tasks are experienced and 100% manageable
- Role models are available
- Feedback is focused on building positive emotions
- Peptalks builds energy and appreciation helps people calm down.
You can coordinate tasks by following another 4 step process
- Assess the situation with broad external attention,
- Analyze prober action going broad internal attention
- Narrowing down internally to plan and prepare
- Finishing broad and narrow with executing the task.
If you found this podcast interesting, you can head over to www.trainingkickstarter.com and find the written manuscript of this podcast as a blogpost with pictures of the models I have presented.
I hope you have found some inspiration for your next ocean race, and I wish you God Speed and a Safe journey.
Check out my workshops and keynotes and feel free to contact for a qoute for an online webinar.