Women sleeping with her head covered by a pillow. Credit: Dreamstime via TNS
Athletes make deliberate decisions throughout the day to maintain peak health, including sleep.
When athletes function with little to no sleep, tiredness and brain fog are common side effects, but can also result in long-term performance — and a pair of Ohio State researchers say the same applies to students.
Josh Hagan and Emaly Vatne spent five years gathering and analyzing athletes’ sleep schedules, working to publish their findings in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in November 2025.
Vatne, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State and former captain of the Ohio State Women’s Soccer team, and Hagan is the faculty director of the Human Performance Collaborative at the university. Together, they’ve collaborated on projects in the sphere of sports science.
Key findings include reduced sleep efficiency, taking more time to fall asleep, specifically when there is practice before 8 a.m.
“It took athletes longer to fall asleep when they had to wake up early, and then their sleep efficiency was also reduced,” Vatne said. “We attributed that to the buildup, or the anxiety you have [from] an early morning wake-up coming.”
Poor sleep quality not only has short-term impacts, such as feeling tired and brain fog, but can also affect long-term performance.
“If you lift a ton of weights, if you train really hard and you get crappy sleep that night, you’re actually affecting muscle repair and recovery,” Hagan said. “You create [Human Growth Hormone] and testosterone while you’re sleeping. That’s the stuff that actually repairs your muscles.”
While the study collected data from athletes, they also apply to students who are up early for class, work or whatever else takes them out of bed before the sun rises.
“You guys [are pulling] all nighters and staying up super late to get ready for that test the next day,” Hagan said. “There are so many studies that show that [sleep is] where all of your memories are formed. If you learn all that information and you don’t give yourself a sleep opportunity, then it doesn’t have a chance to actually get encoded.”
While early classes or shifts at work are sometimes unavoidable, the simplest solution is going to bed earlier, or at least attempting to.
“The best way to improve is to have an extensive sleep opportunity, which is going to bed earlier, even just 30 minutes to an hour,” Vatne said. “Even if you don’t fall asleep right away, just that time in bed without the use of your phone is really valuable.
There are also simple ways to improve sleep quality.
“Having a dark, quiet room with as little blue light as possible, mindfulness or journaling, just some sort of behavior to get yourself to calm down,” Vatne said. “That way, when it is time to fall asleep, you’re not just passing out because you’re exhausted, but you are truly ready for a full night of sleep.”
If winding down earlier in the evening is completely unattainable, planning a midday nap can be the way to go, Vatne said.
“For the example of staying up super late to study, even just a daytime nap is like a great way to just improve total sleep time in a 24-hour window,” Vatne said. “Being disciplined about keeping naps under 90 minutes.”
Finding a solid sleep routine in college can be difficult, but once you do, the benefits far outweigh the struggles of getting there, especially in the long-run, Hagan said.
“If we know in general these things have a good physiological effect, it’s gonna affect different people differently,” Hagan said. “Now here’s your personal cocktail of ‘Okay, do this, this and this, because this works.’”
In short, sleep is arguably one of the most important parts of the day to prioritize, even if it’s just implementing little habits, Vatne said.
“It’s not always a financial strategy,” Vatne said. “It comes back to discipline and commitment to doing things right on a behavioral side.”
