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Are fatigued referees hurting your favourite team’s shot at a championship?

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The life of a professional referee in the NHL, NBA or world premiere soccer may sound glamorous and fun (the travel! the games!) but the reality is, their schedules can be even more demanding than those of the athletes themselves and may contribute to game refereeing errors and stress.

In 2008 Mike Leggo wrote about a week in the life of an NHL referee. On day one, he leaves his home on the West Coast for a next day game in Washington. “The trip is a demanding four games in five days,” he says, “encompassing Washington, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Columbus…Six nights, seven flights, two countries, thousands of air miles…all in a week in the life of an NHL referee”.

Hockeybuzz.com blog recently interviewed NHL referee, Paul Devorski: “There’s actually quite a bit of travel,” Paul confirms, “It’s hard to do, but they try to travel you around so you get to see every team X amount of times, so that keeps you busy. Our road trips are anywhere from a week to 10 days.” He enjoys the actual experience of game officiating, but admits “Honesty, the travel gets wear and tear on you.”

Fatiguing schedules aren’t just a problem for referees in the NHL. The NBA’s Pat Fraher told RefereeMindset.com that the life of an NBA ref is busy: “Travel is hectic…a different city every 2 days for about 25 days a month.” Last year Dallas Maverick’s owner, Mark Cuban, pointed out that the “stressful travel schedule of the condensed season” might have contributed to the “poor quality of officiating”.  And in UK Premiership soccer, West Ham United manager, Sam Allardyce, stressed that their “referees are travelling all over the country and out in Europe” for the duration of their seasons. He has famously blamed referee fatigue for decision errors during games, “Fatigue is everything in terms of decision making,” he said back in December, “Once it kicks in you lose the ability to make those decisions correctly…They need to ease the load on the referees we have.”

Professional sport teams are starting to take a more analytical look at the ways that training and travel schedules affect their athletes’ fatigue and game time effectiveness, but who is addressing those of the referees when the wrong call can make the difference in a team’s league standing?

Our own Pat Byrne recently spoke to Vancouver’s Team 1040 radio about fatigue management and professional sports, acknowledging the frustrations that team management and players must face when the wrong calls change their game momentum, “You’re doing all the training, you’re doing all the coaching, you’re doing everything you possibly can and then you get a tired official making a dumb mistake…you miss a hand ball, you miss a penalty and you lose a game….It’s fixable” he says.

Do you know how tired you are?

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In a recent Psychology Today article, Mark Wolverton, suggests that when it comes to sleep deprivation, the gravest danger is “that we no longer realize just how tired we are”.

Mark has a point. Our own sleep and fatigue expert, Pat Byrne, often talks about the unfortunate realities of habitual sleep deprivation – pointing out that getting four to six hours of sleep a night may start to feel normal, but it doesn’t change the biological need to sleep eight. The accumulating deficit of sleep is evident in reaction and performance tests, even though participants might think they feel fine. Pat often sees professional athletes with whom he works confuse how they feel with how they perform. There is a difference.

In a society that would never consider getting behind the wheel of car after a few drinks, people are driving their cars with impaired levels of fatigue. In the US, fatigued driving is estimated to be responsible for 6,000 fatal road accidents annually. The problem is an international one – in the UK, it is estimated that 1 in every 5 road accidents is fatigue related. Southern Australia also reports  30% of fatal crashes and 15% of serious injury crashes are caused by fatigued drivers. The problem? Fatigue impairs not only our reaction time, but our “ability to judge our own level of tiredness”.

On a much less dangerous level, college and university students who stay up late to study are doing themselves an academic disservice. Multiple studies, including one from Harvard, have demonstrated that fatigue negatively affects the brain’s cortex – which is where information is stored. ‘Night owls’ and students who routinely deprive themselves of eight hours of sleep may think they are functioning well, but studies show that those who are staying up late to study or getting less than eight hours of sleep have lower GPA’s than those who sleep when and how biology dictates they should.

If you’re sitting down to tackle a thesis paper, researching for your next corporate presentation, driving home from work or heading out on a road trip, don’t think about how you’re currently feeling, think about how much sleep you’ve been getting lately. If it’s less than eight hours nightly for the last week, chances are it’s not enough to function at your most effective.

Finally, consider this: Drowsiness is actually the ‘brain’s last step before falling asleep‘, so waiting for the feeling of tiredness is both counter-productive and downright dangerous. Drinking a coffee or opening a window for fresh air may seem like a good way to battle the onset of fatigue, but research shows that if you close your laptop to get some shut eye, you’re likely to perform better and if you park your car and get some sleep, you may actually save a life.

Interested in learning more about data-driven fatigue management?

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or download our free eBook on the Science of Sleep for industrial workforces

Siliconangle.com: Self-trackers to keep fatigue at bay

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Fatigue Science’s Readiband was recently covered in siliconangle.com‘s Quantified Self roundup featuring self-trackers that can help improve performance and health.

Melissa Tolentino writes:

Fatigue Science delivers a few different products that help us understand how fatigue is affecting our lives, with its Fatigue Management Technology. One of its offerings is the Readiband, a smartwatch that tracks micro 3D movements of your wrist 16 times per second. It then uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine the quality and quantity of your sleep.

The technology is based on a model developed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Development Command to convert fatigue levels into performance data. The point of this smartwatch is to reiterate the importance of getting enough sleep in order to function well throughout the day. Getting enough sleep is vital to person’s well-being as it keeps people focused and maintains normal levels of reaction time.

The Readiband is lightweight, waterproof, and practically indestructible, so you can wear it no matter what field of work you are in.

Read the full article

2 reasons why a sleep room won’t help the Red Sox

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The Boston Red Sox have installed a “sleep room” at Fenway Park. While David Ross confirms this is a “nice” way to cope with strenuous travel schedules and an intense season, the problem is that it acts like a band-aid on the larger issues that work against professional sports teams.

David Ross

Although I do applaud CEO Larry Lucchino for recognizing the importance of sleep, there are two key factors that the “sleep room” does not address:

1. Road games aren’t addressed. As a team, going on the road is a major source of fatigue related problems. A singular sleep room at your home field may temporarily alleviate the symptoms of fatigue, it fails to address this core issue.

What’s missing is you need to understand the effects of your travel specific schedule on your body. Once you can clearly see the connection fatigue is having on performance, then you can begin the process of putting measures in place that optimize rest time. Any way you slice it, this a major problem for road games, and a nice sleep room at your home field is missing the point.

2. Napping is not the solution for sports teams. If players on your team are so tired midday that they feel the need to nap, it is very likely they are either not getting enough sleep, or not enough quality sleep at night. You could be missing a big piece of the puzzle by providing a band-aid style solution.

While a quiet room to take a nap may be a good option to stay functional for many people who work 12-hour night shifts, a baseball team would find more benefit from a more dedicated, personalized plan for rest.

There is no doubt that professional athletes perform best when they are rested. Tiger Woods is yet another example of an athlete finding out the hard way why sleep is a core component to a successful training routine. Woods, seeking his sixth victory this year at the Tour Championship in Atlanta fell nine strokes off the pace overnight.  He reportedly “ran out of gas”. Make no mistake, an hour nap before this tournament would not have helped him.

Tiger Woods (via Reuters and FirstPost)

Recognition that sleep plays an important role in an athlete’s career is not enough.  If you do not have accurate data that shows not only the quantity, but the quality of sleep an athlete is getting, you don’t have the full picture.  Decision-making based on anything less than the full picture is a stab in the dark at improving sport performance.

Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg: “I’d force myself to get more sleep.”

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It’s hard to imagine that anyone holding a COO position at Facebook and ranked among the most powerful and influential business leaders would admit to many regrets in the building of their career, but Sheryl Sandberg has one thing she would go back and change – the amount of sleep she got. In her widely popular book ‘Lean In‘ (currently in it’s 24th week on the NY Times bestseller list), Sheryl addresses the need for people to feel like they can do it all and the “new normal” in the American workplace – including longer working hours and technology that makes it difficult for us to turn off work and go to sleep. Feeling like there were never enough hours in the day to juggle work and family, she dealt with the demands “by skimping on sleep” and admits that it was “a common but often counterproductive approach… Sleep deprivation just makes people anxious, irritable and confused.”

Sheryl backs up her statements on work and sleep with a number of studies and resources, including the Harvard Business Review’s publication on ‘Sleep Deficit”, which equates mental impairment by sleep deprivation from four or five hours of sleep a night with that of a legally impaired blood alcohol level.

“If I could go back and change one thing about how I lived in those early years,” Sheryl says, “I would force myself to get more sleep.”

Hindsight is always 20/20, but the understanding that a good night’s sleep can actually help, not hinder your career doesn’t have to be.

Sleep your way to better business

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We often hear of tales of the “Sleepless Elite” who forgo sufficient sleep in order to get ahead. Prominent leaders and business CEO’s such as Marissa Myer, Donald Trump and Condolezza Rice all claim the key to their success has been by getting less than 6 hours of sleep a night. However, the influence of these sleepless elite are having a serious effect on the younger members of our society. A recent post by our CEO, Sean Kerklann, highlighted how unpaid interns are feeling the pressure to work extremely long hours in order to get ahead – in two instances these internships have lead to deaths.

The truth is, lack of sufficient sleep can affect not only your productivity but it can also increase your accident risk and can lead to health conditions such as obesity and diabetes. Here at Fatigue Science we regularly see how fatiguing our 24/7 society is and how it is effecting workplace safety, performance and productivity.

We recently found this infographic from AirMattress.com detailing on why getting enough sleep is the key to getting ahead.

 

infographic_sleep_your_way_to_better_business