Throughout a student athletes’ career, they learn and develop essential life skills such as leadership and collaboration, along with becoming a well-rounded individual. Aside from a team environment, you learn how to balance academics with athletics, but how do you ensure a healthy body and mind? The answer is simple: sleep. Sleep deficiency and restlessness has the ability to affect a student athletes’ athletic performance by increasing risk of physical injury and causing mental health issues.

After continuous physical activity, sleep gives the body a chance to repair and regenerate from one day to the next. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, and growth plates use this duration of rest to recover and help prevent overuse injuries. Without proper sleep, athletes are exposed to an increased risk of concussions and an impair in recovery, following injury. As medical centers began understanding sleep deficiency better overtime, research from 2022 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that restlessness is causing more than just external body injuries and aches. National heart, lung and blood institute stated that, “lack of sleep is linked to many chronic health problems, including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression.” This demonstrates the importance of how a significant amount of sleep is one step to improving an athletes’ health.

Aside from physical health, sleep deficiency also has the capability of effecting a student athletes' mental health. The continuous feeling of being tired comes with lack of motivation and feelings of worthlessness; symptoms that lead to depression. Changes in brain activity and depression impacts an athletes’ energy, anger levels, weight, interests and can cause injuries or reckless behavior. Research from Columbia University Department of Psychiatry explained that “poor or insufficient sleep has been found to increase negative emotional responses to stressors and to decrease positive emotions” as well as, “increased risk for mental health disorders, even in completely healthy athletes” (Elizabeth Blake Zakarin). Although some may argue that mental health disorders cannot stem from lack of sleep, studies have shown that sleep deprivation amplifies reactions in the amygdala and anterior insula parts of the brain causing more anxiety than someone who gets over 7 hours of sleep.

Along with stemming mental and physical health issues, inadequate sleep can impair muscular strength, speed, and other aspects of physical performance. Sleep deprivation decreases an athletes’ endurance, is associated with fatigue, and reduces muscle strength during workouts. On the other hand, with 9 or more hours of rest, an athlete's accuracy can increase by 10%. Quality sleep allows muscle tissue time to recover between physical activity and provides the energy that is needed to have a quality performance.

To conclude, the impacts of sleep deprivation and restlessness has the ability to affect a student athletes’ athletic performance by increasing risk of physical injury and causing mental health issues. The impacts and long-lasting effects of a deficient injury or illness, compared to a simple solution, emphasizes the importance of quality sleep. To help an athlete to stay in good health, as well as improve overall lifestyle, it is key to have a consistent sleeping cycle and get at least 7 hours of rest.