Tweeting Before The Big Game Is Not Going To Help You Win

Image courtesy of Adam Fagen

Staying up late and failing to get enough sleep can impair your performance the following day. This includes NBA players who stay up Tweeting, a new report finds. 

A study from Stony Brook University found that NBA players had worse personal statistics in games that followed a late night of Tweeting.

The study, which was published in SLEEP, aimed to examine the impact of sleep deprivation on the real-world performance of athletes by analyzing 112 verified NBA players’ Twitter activity, including a total of 30,000 Tweets sent during seven basketball seasons between 2009 and 2016.

According to the study, players who Tweeted between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. the night before a game scored on average one point less, and their accuracy dropped 1.7% compared to their performance when they did not participate in late-night Tweeting.

Additionally, the night after Tweeting, players took fewer shots and had few rebounds, steals, and blocks.

While none of these characteristics are exactly stellar when you’re playing in a big game, the study notes that some statistical changes could be the result of athletes playing fewer minutes per game.

Still, the researchers believe that the study results provide yet another reason why it’s important to get a full night’s sleep in order to perform at peak performance.

“Twitter is currently an untapped resource for late-night behavior data that can be used as a proxy for not sleeping,” Jason J. Jones, assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, said in a statement. “We hope this will encourage further studies making use of time-stamped online behavior to study the effects of sleep deprivation on real-world performance.”

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