Learning about sleep with Dr Simon

Sunday night the members of the Whitman tennis team were treated to a very special team dinner with Dr Richard Simon. Dr Simon is an internationally known researcher and expert in sleep and sleep disorders. Dr Simon was recently featured in a HBO documentary "Wide Awake". More importantly Dr Simon played varsity tennis at Whitman (graduated 1972) before graduate school at University of Chicago!

Some of the interesting facts about sleeping

• College students need 9 to 9.5 hours of sleep (most get under 7)
• Getting only 6 hours of sleep is equivalent to functioning under 2 drinks
• If someone only gets 6 hours of sleep their reaction time decreases about 100 milliseconds. How does correspond to athletics? In baseball a fastball takes about 450 milliseconds to leave the pitchers hand and travel to the plate. Obviously 100 millisecond slower reaction time would make a huge difference
• A study of second serves with Whitman College tennis players about 6 years ago found a 10% improvement in 2nd serves with an extra 2 hours of sleep!
• It takes about an hour to actually become fully awake. In fact for optimal "performance" Dr Simon recommends waking up an hour before class (athletics) even at the expense of less sleep. For example a day of poor nutrition probably won't have a huge impact on athletic performance but a poor night of sleep can be disastrous.

We also spent time discussing strategies for shifting one's time clock to adjust different time zones, sleep disorders, and why the Seattle Mariners will never win the World Series.

Thanks to Dr Simon for taking time out of his busy schedule to have dinner with the tennis team!

This is the first of a series of team dinners with successful professionals in a wide variety of fields.