The Negative Effects of Travel on Student Athletes Through Sleep and Circadian Disruption

Abstract

Collegiate athletes must satisfy the academic obligations common to all undergraduates, but they have the additional structural and social stressors of extensive practice time, competition schedules, and frequent travel away from their home campus. Clearly such stressors can have negative impacts on both their academic and athletic performances as well as on their health. These concerns are made more acute by recent proposals and decisions to reorganize major collegiate athletic conferences. These rearrangements will require more multi-day travel that interferes with the academic work and personal schedules of athletes. Of particular concern is additional east-west travel that results in circadian rhythm disruptions commonly called jet lag that contribute to the loss of amount as well as quality of sleep. Circadian misalignment and sleep deprivation and/or sleep disturbances have profound effects on physical and mental health and performance. We, as concerned scientists and physicians with relevant expertise, developed this white paper to raise awareness of these challenges to the wellbeing of our student-athletes and their co-travelers. We also offer practical steps to mitigate the negative consequences of collegiate travel schedules. We discuss the importance of bedtime protocols, the availability of early afternoon naps, and adherence to scheduled lighting exposure protocols before, during, and after travel, with support from wearables and apps. We call upon departments of athletics to engage with sleep and circadian experts to advise and help design tailored implementation of these mitigating practices that could contribute to the current and long-term health and wellbeing of their students and their staff members.

Keywords: academic and athletic performance; chronic jet lag; circadian misalignment; sleep and circadian health; student mental health.

Figure 1.

Disruptions of circadian rhythms due to eastward and westward travel across 3 time zones. (a) The outer circle represents clock time. The inner circle represents circadian time. Before travel these 2 cycles largely coincide. Small differences due to the fact that the period of the circadian rhythm is not exactly 24 h are corrected by the process of entrainment largely due to exposure to light in the morning and evening. Daily activities such as bedtime and wake time occur at specific times or phases of the circadian clock. (b) Traveling 3 time zones to the east puts the circadian clock 3 h behind local time, requiring the circadian clock to be moved ahead, or phase advanced by 3 h. This phase advance may take several days to once again synchronize circadian time to local time, and until that occurs the onset and termination of optimal sleep will be delayed. (c) Conversely, traveling 3 time zones to the west puts the circadian clock 3 h ahead of local time. until the process of entrainment brings circadian time in synchrony with local time by a phase delay of the circadian clock, the onset and termination of optimal sleep will occur at earlier clock times than desired.

Figure 2.

Different types of activities and skills have different circadian rhythms in optimal performance under entrained conditions (i.e., normal training week). Game day travel (especially east-west travel) often misaligns these circadian rhythms of athletic performance making optimal performance more challenging to achieve.

Figure 3.

The 2-process model of sleep regulation. The strength of the circadian wake-promoting process is portrayed by the light-colored bars. It is lowest during the sleep phase from around 2300 h to 0700 h. The use-dependent process that generates the need for sleep is portrayed by the dark bars that continuously gain in strength over the waking hours, from around 7 AM till the onset of sleep around 11 PM. The difference in the lengths of the bars is an indication of the changes in alertness and sleepiness. A dip in the strength of the circadian process in early PM, between about 2–5, makes this phase a possible time for naps.