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Editor’s note: Before we begin, I’m sorry my newsletters have been a little wonky and all over the place. Now that we’re all back from the holidays, going to get back on my Mon/Wed/Fri grind. Apologies for the inconsistency.
The Inner Game of Fortnite – Sleep Is How We Get Better
So much about the human body is still unknown. While we’ve made great strides in many sub-fields of medicine in the last few hundred years, there’s still a lot more to discover and learn. Part of my fascination with life and why I write this newsletter is that I love to try to understand how we learn, how we improve and get better at anything. I just happen to apply that right now to my favorite game, Fortnite.
A huge part of skill acquisition is sleep. I can’t overstate that enough. We’ve got to sleep to get better. Professional athletes sleep a ton. They get their eight hours; they take naps. Their coaches have instilled in them that sleep isn’t for the weak, it’s what makes us strong! It’s where muscle is built, where our brains repair, where our body flushes out harmful toxins we’ve picked up in the course of our day.
When we practice a skill, we’re creating neural pathways – links – between clusters of neurons in our brain. Think about neural pathways like a trail in the forest. The first time you walk a new trail that hasn’t been forged, there are plants and leaves everywhere. There’s no clear place for your feet to go. If you keep coming back every day and if others start walking that trail as well, the leaves get moved by the activity, the dirt starts to show, and after a while, the dirt gets deeper and groove forms in the ground. After many days or maybe months of walking the same path, over and over, you’ve got a groove in the ground – a new trail.
That trail is earned. There’s proof of work in that trail (hat tip to Eugene Wei for the analogy). Proof of kinetic energy, calories burned, humans traveled. If we walk that same path once and then again a few months later, there’s no groove in the ground. We didn’t put in the work required to forge a new pathway. We have to keep coming back.
Getting back to sleep though: sleep is where our brains synthesize things. When we sleep, our brain repairs itself. It fortifies connections. It subconsciously processes things that we worked on recently, like practicing a new skill or reinforcing an existing one. When we practice something and then sleep, our brain is clearing the leaves. It’s saying to itself, “this is something we do, something we need to remember.”
“Sleeping on it” is a real thing! It’s part of how we invest in ourselves and our performance. Sleep is the other side of the coin in how we get better.
Side note: Did you know that your unconscious brain, the part that is always working, but you can’t readily access by thinking, is 10,000 times more powerful than your conscious brain (the one you call when you’re like, “let me remember the name of that Taylor Swift song”)? Your unconscious brain is always working. It’s non-verbal too. It has no way of verbally connecting with the conscious part of your brain. When we talk about our “gut” or when we have a feeling or when we “know” something or it’s on the tip of our tongue, we’re talking about our unconscious brain.
There’s only so much we can get out of drills or deliberate practice. We can only run aim training for so long before we get diminishing returns.
The best way to practice that I’ve found is to:
Have a practice sessions that are about 2 hours or less and are deliberately designed for improvement.
Take short breaks during the session to reflect and recover.
Stop at the end, get some food, and some good sleep later in the day.
Endless sessions aren’t helpful.
Get in, do the work, get out, sleep.
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That’s it for today, see you Friday!
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