Sleep advice shifted habits, not measured sleep

Sleep hygiene advice is a staple of athlete support, but the practical question of how to deliver it is rarely tested. Coaches can hand over a printed sheet or spend time talking an athlete through the same points, and those two options cost very different amounts of staff time. If a leaflet works as well as a conversation, support teams can scale advice across a squad. This trial set out to compare the two delivery routes and, crucially, to check whether either one changes sleep that is measured rather than merely reported.

The researchers ran a three-arm randomised controlled trial in 66 track and field athletes competing at regional or national level. Participants were allocated to a control group (22), a written sleep hygiene group (22) or a verbal sleep hygiene group (22). Sleep was recorded with actigraphy and a sleep diary across a ten-day baseline period and a ten-day intervention period. Six objective sleep parameters and the Sleep Regularity Index were assessed, and athletes also kept a training diary and completed the Sleep Hygiene Index questionnaire.

No statistically significant differences emerged between or within groups for training or objective sleep parameters. What did change was the questionnaire: Sleep Hygiene Index scores improved significantly in both intervention groups between baseline and the intervention period, and differed from the control group. Total sleep time showed a non-significant improvement in the intervention groups, which the authors attributed mainly to athletes going to bed earlier. In other words, self-reported behaviour moved while the wrist-worn measurements did not.

The result sits with a familiar pattern in behaviour-change research, where knowledge and reported habits shift faster than objectively measured outcomes. It suggests the delivery format — written or verbal — is not the bottleneck, since both moved the questionnaire equally. Open questions include whether a ten-day window is simply too short for sleep architecture to respond, whether athletes who already sleep reasonably well have little room to improve, and whether targeting poor sleepers specifically would produce measurable gains.

This is a reason to be cautious about assuming that receiving sleep advice, in any format, automatically translates into more or better sleep. The athletes here reported cleaner sleep habits after either delivery method, but the objective measures did not follow within the study period. It also suggests that if you are choosing between reading guidance and being talked through it, the format itself may matter less than whether the advice is acted on for long enough to register. Anything beyond short-term behaviour change remains untested here.