Abstract
The current study aimed to examine sleep characteristics of esport players and the stipulated effects of game performance on consecutive sleep characteristics using residual dynamic structural equation modeling (RDSEM). A sample of 27 Counterstrike players with a mean age of 18½ years participated in the current study. Sleep was detected over a period of 56 days with a Somnofy sleep monitor that utilizes an impulse radio ultra-wideband puls radar and Dopler technology, and weekly game performance was reported by the players. The results showed that esport players' sleep characteristics were in the lower levels of recommended guidelines and that sleep onset started later and sleep offset ended later in the morning compared with athletes from other traditional sports. The esport players displayed stable patterns in sleep onset, sleep offset, time in bed, sleep efficiency and non-REM respiration rates per minute (NREM RPM). On the between-person level, esport players with better game performance spent more time sleeping (r = 0.55) and scored lower on NREM RPM (r = −0.44). Unstandardized within-person cross-lagged paths showed that better game performance predicted subsequent earlier sleep offset. The within-level standardized estimates of the cross-lagged paths revealed that participants with better game performance spent subsequently more time in deep sleep (0.20), less time in light sleep (−0.14), less time in bed (−0.16), and displayed lower NREM RPM (−0.21), earlier sleep offset (−0.21), and onset (−0.09). The findings of better game performance being related to better sleep are discussed in terms of existing knowledge on how stress responses elicitated by poor performance might impact on non-REM respiration rates and sleep.
Highlights
Esport is an organized and competitive way of playing video games, established by international ranking systems regulated by official leagues (Pedraza-Ramirez et al, 2020)
Stress is a response to a stressor and several internal and external stressors have been identified among elite competitive esport players (Fletcher et al, 2006; Smith et al, 2019)
The results of the current study showed that the esport players obtained a mean of 07:12 h (SD = 01:54) of total sleep per night during the 56 days of sleep monitoring, and that they fell asleep late at night (02:09) and woke up late in the morning (10:10)
Summary
Esport is an organized and competitive way of playing video games, established by international ranking systems regulated by official leagues (Pedraza-Ramirez et al, 2020). Even in traditional sports the majority of the studies measure sleep by actigraphy, which is a wrist activity monitor, or by sleep diaries/questionnaires (Leeder et al, 2012) Neither of these measurements have sleep staging accuracy that is reliable and needed to explore associations between physical or psychological loads and recovery. It is conceivable that potential stress induced by poor game performances might negatively influence esport players’ sleep (Morin et al, 2003; Fullagar et al, 2015) Based on this reasoning, it is hypothesized that better game performance will be associated with subsequent better sleep. The aims of the current study are two-fold: (1) to describe sleep patterns in esport players and their perceptions about their own sleep, and (2) to investigate prospective associations between game performance and sleep
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