The Importance of Sleep and its Effect on Knowledge Retention and Mechanical Performance

How many posts have we all seen in the last couple years along the lines of “6 Easy Tips for Raising MMR,” “This One Simple Trick Will Boost You 3 Divisions,” “15 Things Diamond Players Do That Bronze Players Don't”? It's gotten to the point where seeing one elicits nothing but groans and rolled eyes – yes, everyone gets it. Call MIAs. Don't rage. Ward. Just play better. Basically, anyone who cares to improve has already heard it all before. But there's one angle that I've seen spring up more and more lately: people have begun paying more and more attention to the things you can do outside of the game to improve your play in-game.

The precursor of this was Snoopeh's #GetFitWithSnoopeh campaign – knowing the importance of both regular exercise and working off excess energy after a game, Snoopeh started to popularize the idea of incrementally increasing physical activity. A few sit-ups while in queue, some push-ups here and there, every little bit goes a long way. Snoopeh is a player who's always kept his health in mind, as evidenced by the fact that going to the gym was one of the last things he gave up in order to practice 14-15 hours a day for the 2014 Summer Split. To that end, he tried to spread the word to players that physical health is as important as mental clarity when playing League (or when doing anything, really).

In that same vein, more and more people are advocating the value of paying attention to your body. It's regular for LCS players to attend the gym at least a few times a week, most of the teams have by this point acquired life coaches and chefs so that the players can focus more on the game, and you see reddit threads espousing the virtues of staying hydrated while you play. It's wonderful that in both the esports and casual spheres, people are putting a greater emphasis on elements outside of the game that can help you concentrate on your play.

Despite this increased concern with physical health elements and how they can have an impact on play, there's a significant factor that I feel hasn't been covered nearly enough: sleep. We're starting to see the seeds of this in North America; rarely if ever are LCS players streaming past 2 AM, especially on LCS nights, and we've heard that teams are stressing roughly synchronized sleeping patterns. The issue is even more carefully minded in Korea, where in many team houses, a strict midnight lights out policy is enforced. But in the NA LCS, you still see players yawning and chugging coffee trying to wake up before games. Stress is a factor here; we know that some players such as Voyboy and Seraph have been struggling with the intensely pressure-filled environment, and it's safe to assume that has an effect on players' ability to sleep. Toyz, for instance, has spoken on multiple occasions of how he lost sleep when he was getting so much negative attention from the community, and this lost sleep created a negative feedback loop that adversely affected his health.

But for most of us, we don't need to worry about the pressure of hundreds of thousands of spectators and fans on us to perform. There's no excuse for not adding “well-rested” to the list of things you check off before starting up a long laddering session. Would you queue up if you knew your internet was shoddy and you were at risk of dcing every game? (...don't answer that. I don't want to know.) By that same token, you should be fully awake following a good night's sleep to ensure maximum performance. In studies published by the National Transportation Safety Board, fatigue is known to have an adverse effect on reaction time, memory, communication, situational awareness, judgement, attention, and mood, to the order of a 20-50% decrease, based on drowsiness. This is a laundry list of things you want to have at peak capacity for solo queue. You're shooting yourself in the foot by not being fully rested before queuing up for a game.

I'm not advocating never playing a game past midnight; everyone knows the feeling of just wanting to get in one more game with your buddies to play the new jungler you just bought before you head to bed. And that's fine. But for players looking to min-max their performance, sleep is oftentimes something that's completely overlooked – people just aren't aware of the extent to which lack of sleep can hinder your play. Keep in mind that sleep isn't a passive process; a lot of the popular understanding of sleep is a sort of “turning off,” letting your brain rest because it gets burnt out. The reality is quite the opposite: during sleep, the brain is extremely active. Don't think of it as a lack of brain activity, it's really more like different brain activity. To illustrate the impact sleep can have on a training session, it's important to understand how memory functions operate and how memories themselves are stored. There are two types of memory: declarative, and non-declarative. Declarative memories consist of episodic and semantic memories, whereas non-declarative memories consist of procedural, implicit, non-associative, and conditioning memories. The stages of memory formation are as follows: acquisition (encoding), consolidation (stabilization/enhancement), association (integration), recall (recognition), reconsolidation, and erasure.

Some words should stick out in these lists for those of us training our mechanics in solo queue. Different stages of sleep serve different roles, and one of the core sleep stages plays a major part in consolidation of procedural memories, which is to say, memories for particular types of action that often operate below the conscious level of awareness (say, stutter-stepping). Sleep after learning consolidates procedural memory. Sleep actively fixates memories and makes them resistant to forgetting, and enhances our ability to perform mechanical tasks we practiced prior to sleeping. The reason it's recommended that you get a full-night's sleep before taking a major test isn't just for your mental well-being – sleep is a vital part of the process the brain uses to encode memories such that we can access them later. Cramming all night and going to a test without sleeping will actually hinder your performance moreso than if you had studied for just a few hours and slept the rest of the night; sleep archives our memories such that they can be accessed later.

What's the takeaway from all of this? Say you're an AD main who really wanted to work on your micro, so you practiced stutter-stepping for three hours straight in bot games before queuing up for your Plat promos. It's entirely possible that a large part (even a majority!) of your practice went to “waste,” in a sense – since you haven't slept yet, your brain hasn't had the opportunity to consolidate what you've learned for subconscious access later. Even napping can accomplish this same memory consolidation to a certain degree, depending on the length and depth of sleep. There is a misconception that napping is a “lesser” form of sleep. Yes, while napping doesn't provide the full benefits that a longer sleep session can offer, it is every bit as regenerative in the micro sense as any other kind of sleep. Naps can go a long way towards reducing daytime drowsiness and, like in the example above, bolstering the effects of your practice.

I just wanted to write this to clear up some misconceptions surrounding sleep, and help people really understand the role it has in your life and how it can affect your play. Remember, having fun when you play is the most important thing, so there's no sense in stressing that perhaps you shouldn't queue up because you only got 5 hours of sleep last night. At the same time, it is worth considering if you're the type of individual who likes to award yourself every possible advantage in competitive atmospheres. Don't downplay the significance sleep plays in key processes like memory consolidation, and please, PLEASE don't go around saying you can sleep when you're dead. Yes, I understand you'll get a lot more solo queue in if you only get five hours of sleep instead of seven, but you'll receive a major buff to your quality of life by hitting the sack early and getting the extra couple hours of shut-eye. Trust me, your body will thank you later.

Koala

Join the discussion happening on reddit.