What Effect Does Sleep Have On The Mental Toughness Of Referees?

How would you rate the quality of your sleep on a scale of 1-10? Do you wake up feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready for a gym session, or still tired and in need of a few extra hours? Well, if you dream of being a successful referee with high levels of mental toughness, those extra hours of sleep are very important.

While many believe the common myth that mental toughness is the need to conceal your emotions, thrive through pain and sacrifice to achieve success when officiating, this is not true. Mental toughness is showing an awareness of your emotions, learning from your mistakes out in the middle, wanting to improve your refereeing skills, and working as a united officiating team when you cross the white line.

To make it to the pinnacle of refereeing, you need to be mentally tough. So, what does sleep have to do with it?

Why Is Mental Toughness Important For Performance Out In The Middle?

Mental toughness is crucial when out in the middle. It has an impact on your performance in ways – for example, it can:

Help override your negative thoughts

Mentally tough officials have high levels of self-belief. They are confident in their abilities and don’t lose confidence when things mistakes are made. To be mentally tough, it’s important to block out negative thoughts and self-doubt. This aids performance and can increase your motivation levels, especially during key fixtures.

Allow you to handle pressure better

Another characteristic of mental toughness is being able to execute refereeing skills under pressure. Having high levels of mental toughness will help you to see pressure as a challenge and encourage you to work harder and apply more effort to your performance, a­­llowing for success out in the middle.

Increase your levels of concentration

If you have ever met a mentally tough official, you will know their focus is unmatched. Despite them being surrounded by distractions from players and club officials and other obstacles to upholding the Laws of The Game, they do not lose their concentration. They have selective attention and block out irrelevant factors that could hinder performance.

Why Is Sleep Important For Performance As A Referee?

Having a good night’s rest isn’t just important for helping you stay awake in the day, but also crucial to your onfield performance. Sleep has so many benefits, such as:

Reducing your chance of injury

Research has shown that when you get 8 or more hours of sleep a night, you are less likely to experience injury than if you sleep for less than 8 hours. This means that if you don’t want regular physio appointments, you should think about going to bed earlier!

Increasing cognitive function

Insufficient amounts of sleep can have a negative effect on your ability to make decisions on key match incidents, react to changes in phases of play in front of you and think of strategies to manage challenging situations within games. Out in the middle, your thought processes are crucial for successfully delivering a game. Not getting enough sleep can put you at risk of low-level performance.

Reaching peak officiating performance

Sleep also helps improve your physical abilities. A recent study showed that when sleep was increased to 10 hours, the referees were able to sprint faster and make decisions more accurately. This means that if you want to improve your officiating ability, you need to spend more time in bed.

How Does Sleep Link To Mental Toughness?

Researchers have discovered that the relationship between sleep and mental toughness actually goes both ways: your mental toughness can actually make you better at sleeping. They found that those with higher mental toughness sleep better than others who are less mentally tough.

This may be because it acts as a stress buffer. Stress impacts your sleep quality and how long it takes you to fall asleep. Mental toughness was also linked to fewer sleep disturbances, longer sleep duration and better sleep quality. Those who experienced better sleep were left feeling restored and were in a more positive mood. This supports the idea that greater mental toughness is related to better sleep schedules, which we’ve established is a requirement for high performance out in the middle.

4 Tips For A Better Sleep

So, you want to sleep better, but aren’t sure where to start? Here are four simple strategies:

1. Take a hot shower at night – This will help you to relax your mind and your muscles which will make it easier to fall asleep.
2. Have a regular sleep/wake schedule – Creating the habit of sleeping and waking up at a specific time (even at the weekend) will allow your body clock to stay consistent. Once you’ve done this for a while, your body will start to naturally wake up at those times.
3. Stay away from your phone at night – When you’re on your phone in the dark, your brain gets tricked into thinking that the bright light means it daytime. As a result, it will put more effort into keeping you awake. So, when it’s time for bed put your phone away.
4. Make sure you don’t nap for too long – If you nap for a long time during the day, then when you try to go to bed, you won’t feel tired until very late into the night. Try to keep your naps under 30 minutes and avoid napping too close to your bedtime to avoid this.

Final Reflections

Sleep is sometimes the forgotten factor when it comes to improving mental toughness and refereeing success. Many officials and Referee Development Officiers/Managers fail to consider to massive impact it can have on performance.

Better sleep will not just leave you feeling more refreshed in the morning but also increase your mental toughness – which, interestingly, improves your sleep quality in turn. So next time you strive to improve your mental toughness, have a look at your sleep schedule.

At The Third Team I work individually and in collaboration with different professionals where I have developed workshops and 1-2-1 sessions associated with Resilience and Mental Toughness Development to help referees. The workshops and 1-2-1 sessions are interactive, where referees are encouraged to open up and share their experiences to help themselves and each other.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about my workshops or 1-2-1 sessions and how I could help you or your officials.

Best Wishes,