I often talk about how important adequate recovery is for your running. You need to eat the right type of food, you need to have the correct ratio of aerobic to anaerobic training, your need to have regularly scheduled recovery weeks in the lead up to races, and you need to get enough sleep every night.

I have always known that sleep is important for our health and wellbeing, but this TED talk by brain scientist Matt Walker, is a very scary insight into just how important sleep actually is.

It is important for our brain function, our immune function, our cardiovascular system . . . it turns out it is important for every single bodily function we have.

Human beings are the only species on the planet who knowingly and deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. From shift work, to all night parties. Humans have come up with a number of different reasons for sleep deprivation. Irrespective of the reason, a lack of sleep is quite literally killing us.

Here are some of the scary stats that Matt presents us with in the video:

  • Men who sleep for 5 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep for 7 hours or more!
  • Men who sleep only 4 or 5 hours a night have a level of testosterone of someone 10 years their senior.
  • Lack of sleep contributes significantly to alzheimers disease, our ability to learn, and our memory function.
  • In spring, when we lose 1 hour of sleep due to daylight savings, there is a 24% increase globally in heart attacks the following day
  • In autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, there is a 21% global reduction in the number of heart attacks the following day
  • Natural Killer Cells are the part of our immune system which identify and eliminate dangerous and unwanted cells in our body. If you sleep for 4 hours on any one night, there is a 70% drop in Natural Killer Cell activity.

This video is not specifically related to running, or running performance. But it doesn’t take too much thinking outside the box to understand how much of an effect sleep deprivation has on our general health and wellbeing, and therefore, how much of an effect it will have on running performance.