Dr. Allison Brager: Improve Sleep Efficiency & Resilience

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. And today, I'm speaking with Dr. Allison Brager. Allison is a neuroscientist who has spent most of her career focusing on sleep, and specifically sleep resilience, which is one way of thinking about how do we become more efficient and effective with sleep, regardless of the situation. Classic examples of that, her research has looked at everything from athletes traveling from one coast to the other coast, military individuals sleep on Antarctica and in space, as well as just a ton of research for regular people. And how do we just become the most effective we can? What effective sleep is, is actually something I learned a lot about today, and something that you will pick up on, as Allison shared, what that actually means, how you determine it, how you can actually become more specific and precise to your individual sleep needs, and overall, how to better think about sleep for not only surviving, but thriving. Allison is a fantastic scientist. Her publications are numerous, but she spent so much time in the field dealing with individuals, that I think the true value you're going to get out of this episode is understanding how that information that she has gleaned from her research actually manifests itself in the practical real world scenario.
And so, I learned a ton. I know you're going to learn a ton about becoming a resilient and highly effective sleeper. So, with that all said, I hope you enjoy today's episode with Dr. Allison Brager. Dr. Allison Brager, thank you so much for coming out. There's a lot of cool stuff I want to get into today. I was hoping we could start off actually with dispelling a huge sleep myth. I'm from the West Coast, you're from the Midwest. As you are well aware, there is a huge East Coast bias for sports teams. We all know that. The West Coast gets no love. We get unfair placements and things. Can you please confirm and share with the rest of the world that there is, in fact, a huge advantage for East Coast teams, that it is easier, that they win more, that everything is better, and the West Coast teams are truly at a disadvantage?

**Allison Brager** (2:15)
It's actually the opposite. No!
During the regular season, it's actually the opposite. So that's the classic NFL study that was done by some famous Stanford Sleep physicians in the 90s that we sort of reconfirmed in the late 2000s. But this idea that West Coast teams, at least during the regular season, are playing games that are more attuned to their circadian peak than their circadian trail. So basically, what that means is if you just control for biological time, they're playing games more in their mid-morning or early evening. And so that's what gives them this advantage in terms of performance, which has been correlated with injury risk. So they're five times less likely, especially if you look at, like, defensive linemen, offensive linemen, less likely to get injured compared to the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles and all the above. So I'm sorry, I can't help you with this.

**Andy Galpin** (3:23)
All lies. I refuse to believe your data. You're clearly bought by big East Coast sports. I get it. I don't trust it.

**Allison Brager** (3:30)
Hey, I'm actually a huge San Francisco 49ers fan myself.

**Andy Galpin** (3:35)
Even worse.

**Allison Brager** (3:36)
Get out.

**Andy Galpin** (3:38)
I coach Fred Warner. He's a good friend of mine, and I tell him, he knows this. He knows, I hope he loses every game of the year, but that he wins the MVP.
I'm open with my rooting on that one. In terms of the injuries, actually, this is sort of interesting. Is there a particular type of injury? Is it brain injuries or soft tissue or hamstrings, or did it sort of just be across the board with some injuries or something like that?

**Allison Brager** (4:01)
That's a great question. So we more or less just looked at number of weeks spent on injury reserve. That was the only available to us at the time. But we actually were able recently to get some of the concussion data, because that was something that came out of the NFL lawsuit is they had to start publicly recording when players had gotten concussed during a game and stuff.
So no pressure to my wife. She's trying to help me with those types of analyses now. She's much better at statistics than I am.