Burning the midnight oil is great, but high-quality sleep makes you sharper in every area of life.
Most adults suck at sleeping – there are countless sleeping disorders seen all over the U.S. and it leaves us with foggy brains and reduced performance. If you’re looking to make the most of your talents at work, while studying, or keeping your eyes open for another hour of Division 2, good sleep is key.
Supplements are a pretty easy and useful way of boosting your sleep quality. Better sleep means better waking hours – especially if you’ve got competitive aspirations ahead.
Supplements like Performance Lab SLEEP and Mind Lab Pro are some of our favorites and we’re going to use them to discuss what you want to look for on the market when you’re ready to raise your game.
Stick with us for this one and you might find yourself getting early access on an improved version of yourself!
What’s the Issue?
The problems with sleep deprivation are real. When was the last time you got eight hours or more? For most adults, that’s a long while and definitely not the norm.
The average American sleeps 6.8 hours a night, which is 25% less than you need to function optimally. What’s the problem with it? Well, there are serious links between a whole bunch of deadly chronic diseases and sleep deprivation, with 70 million adults being clinically sleep deprived [1].
Especially in gaming, where screen time is high and blue light/stimulation is everywhere, the sleep risks are enormous. Sleep hygiene is important and, while it’s not glamorous, it can be a game-changer (and not the EA-sponsored kind).
This has serious day to day effects beyond the scary life-threatening stuff, however.
Keeping Sharp: Sleep for Speed
Cognitive performance for complicated tasks is seriously compromised during sleep debt. This is a fancy way of saying that you’re going to suck at anything mentally-demanding if you’re not rested and it knocks on to everything you do.
One of the most interesting applications for gaming is that fine motor control and reaction time drop through the floor. Sleep deprivation makes you slow, sluggish, and you process dynamic information at a much slower rate [2].
You might not need to worry so much with RTS, but if you’re in a MOBA where key-strokes are king or high-level FPS then those small differences add up. The simple fact is that physical and psychological performance in gaming are always getting more competitive and sleep deprivation sinks your reactions.
If you can adjust this one factor, you’ll see significant change.
How Can Supplements Help Your Sleep?
Supplement is a pretty loaded term and I think it’s safe to say the common idea of dietary supplements is that it’s for bodybuilders or old people.
Fortunately, that’s absolute nonsense and we’re all starting to cotton on to the importance of nutrition for life. Improving the nutrients that you put in your body improves your brain, eye, and muscle health which are all key for good gaming.
You might not have put two and two together yet, but the importance of your actual body and mind to gaming are hard to ignore. Stereotypes about mountain dew and Doritos are good fun, but you can bet that the guys and gals at the top of E-sports aren’t living up to that silly caricature.
Magnesium: King of Sleep Buffs
If you’re trying to get better sleep, magnesium is your friend. It’s a mineral that is commonly deficient, with over a third of Americans getting less than the recommended daily minimum [3].
Scraping by with what bits and pieces you get from your diet isn’t the best way to get your magnesium up. A supplementary level of magnesium prevents deficiency and provides important benefits to sleep quality, as well as over 300 other processes in the body.
If you’re not getting it yet, magnesium is important. You can take this alone to get better sleep but combining it with other pro-sleep compounds (like the ones below) is key. This is why we like using Performance Lab SLEEP.
The combination of these ingredients together provides even more effective support than apart. Synergy between ingredients is about getting more benefits from taking compounds together than individually – which is something you’ll experience with these
Amino Acids (Tyrosine, L-Theanine, Tryptophan)
Surprisingly, Tyrosine, Theanine and Tryptophan aren’t generic endgame bosses.
They’re a collection of amino acids that are turned into neurotransmitters in the body. These are the raw materials for a healthy brain, such as serotonin – the happy compound in the brain.
However, it’s not just about feeling great (but that too); these compounds can fight stress, reduce fatigue, control mood, and reduce anxiety and depression [4].
That’s a pretty cool list of active effects, but it’s particularly interesting in relation to sleep.
For example, Tryptophan is a key player in the quality and quantity of your sleep, as it will also improve restful sleep and help combat that crappy sleep deprivation we discussed above. You can find it too in Performance Lab SLEEP. Similarly, Tyrosine can help you support wakefulness during serious sleep debt, so you can continue to perform if you’ve had poor sleep.
Tart cherries
This one isn’t what you might expect from a brain-boosting sleep supplement since it’s a plant extract.
Tart cherries are one of the key ingredients in good sleep support products since they have been shown to improve sleep quality – especially in the sleep deprived. That’s because they are the richest natural source of melatonin you can find. Melatonin, of course, is the hormone that tells your brain when it’s time to sleep. Its production in the body increases during dark hours and falls when it’s light.
As a gamer, all that blue light can, and does, disrupt your natural melatonin cycle, sometimes even putting it in reverse, so an additional source of safe, healthy melatonin can help get you back on track. Even better, by opting for a natural supplement like Performance Lab SLEEP, which contains tart cherries, it helps to ensure you’re not getting an overdose of melatonin, as many OTC melatonin supplements contain synthetic mega-doses that can come with some side-effects (weird dreams, anyone?)
If you’re looking to relieve insomnia without accidentally slipping into the shadow realm in your dreams, this is probably the best substitute. Healthy, antioxidant, and much safer!
These factors are why we prefer using a natural supplement like tart cherries in Performance Lab SLEEP instead of clinically-risky melatonin supplements. It’s about getting all the benefits with less of the drawbacks or risks or shady practices.
Rhodiola
Rhodiola is a cool compound. It’s one of the special herbal ingredients that actually works. It’s a well-known and documented compound for reducing fatigue and encouraging better responses to stress.
These combine well, especially with other interesting implications from the science. These include improved brain health and resistance to degeneration/disease – though it’s too early to tell just how powerful and effective this compound is.
Either way, it’s a fantastic compound for supporting your brain health, especially if you can get it in combination with other compounds on this list. This is why we like another supplement, a cognitive enhancer or nootropic, Mind Lab Pro – which provides a fantastic combination of Rhodiola with classical ingredients like the amino acids mentioned above.
This may not be a sleep supplement, but it helps to ensure you’re firing on all cylinders during the day, helping to make the most of the cognition-jump you’ll benefit from when you do finally get those extras Zzzs.
Getting these compounds in combination is a great way to cover all your bases and combining the best nutrients you can get.
B vitamins: 6, 9, 12
Whether you’re asleep or awake, B vitamins affect your energy levels. They’re essential for metabolism and supporting both wakefulness and performance [5].
If you’re feeling fatigued early in the day or you find yourself struggling to concentrate when it matters most, upping your vitamin B intake can be key. This affects sleep-restfulness but also waking concentration levels and performance.
You can actually get plenty of B vitamins – and all the other key nutrient you need for better performance – with another Performance Lab product, their whole-food multivitamin. This is packed with B vitamins, and there are a bunch of other compounds that help health. Bonus.
Supplement checklist: things to look for and things to avoid
With the state of the supplement industry, you want to make sure you’re keeping your eye out for the best products. You need to be conscious of what you’re putting into your body and set some standards for what you do/don’t want.
Here are some of our key factors for evaluating a supplement.
- Eco-friendly and sustainable
An effective supplement that has awful manufacturing practices or is built on unsustainable farming is always going to be worse for everyone than a sustainable, eco-friendly alternative.
Responsible practice is always good: we all know that resource-gathering can be a pain. A responsible company produces supplements sustainably.
A better production chain means a better product, all other things being equal.
- Clean label and free from nonsense
The last thing you want from your supplement is a hidden ingredient. We’ve seen this in the fitness space where certain products were shipped with illicit drugs.
You need to control what goes into your body and a reputable, well-regarded brand and product makes sure that you’re getting what it says on the bottle.
You also want to avoid any unnecessary complications or filler: soy, gluten and GMO ingredients are all totally unnecessary in a sleep supplement. Avoiding them is an easy way to get peace of mind and the best sleep supplement for your money.
3rd party testing is even better – offering peace of mind about the quality and dosage of the products themselves.
Final Thoughts: Sleep habits and Hygiene
We’ve talked about sleep supplements but having your sleep hygiene together first is always crucial. The habits around sleep change everything and no supplement will ever make up for missed hours.
The point is to combine good sleep habits with good sleep supplements for optimal performance. Here are a few keys you should be looking towards when building a better sleep schedule:
- Bed alarms: this is simple. Set yourself an alarm for when bedtime is and stick with it whenever you can. This improves your sleep quantity and quality, especially if you set them for wind-down time and allow yourself some specific relaxation time.
- Light adjustments: by reducing your overall light intake later in the day – and specifically blue light – you can improve sleep quality. Insomnia can easily come from over-stimulation so take some time between gaming and sleeping to relax your mind and focus on other things.
- Sleep environment: the space you sleep in matters. A cool, dry, quiet, dark room is where you want to be spending your sleeping hours. Investing in a black-out blind or changing your light sources is a great way to sleep better.
- Early mornings beat late nights: If you really want to burn the midnight oil, consider getting up earlier rather than sleeping later. This frees up just as many hours in the day, ensures you’ve gotten enough sleep, and you’ll be energized during those extra hours.
If you’re doing these and you’re taking a good supplement for sleep like Performance Lab SLEEP, you’ll be well on your way. Mind Lab Pro is a good way to improve wakefulness when you’re under pressure, stressed, or tired, but it’s important to remember that supplements – despite their benefits – don’t replace sleep.
Get your sleep in, but make sure you’re supporting your best performance at every level. If you want to be the best version of yourself, you have to fuel up accordingly – check back on this article if you ever need to know what you’re looking for!
[1] over 70 million adults are sleep deprived
[2] Sleep deprivation effects on performance
[3] Subclinical magnesium deficiency – prevalence and implications
[4] dietary amino acids and their effect on brain function
[5] role of B vitamins in wellbeing and energy metabolism (table 1)
I'm a published author and proud US Army veteran who happens to be a gamer, so I decided to combine the two and love every minute of it! Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments and I'll be sure to get back to you.
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