If you've ever lain awake the night before something important — a job interview, a first date, a difficult conversation — you already have something in common with Olympic athletes.
A recent New York Times piece published during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games highlighted something that might surprise you: nearly 40 percent of Team U.S.A. athletes reported poor sleep in a 2024 study. These are the most physically conditioned people on earth, preparing for the highest-stakes performances of their lives — and they struggle to sleep just like the rest of us.
What sports psychologists are teaching these athletes has a lot to offer anyone dealing with sleep anxiety, nighttime rumination, or the exhausting cycle of trying too hard to rest.
The Paradox of Sleep Effort
One of the central findings in how Olympic psychologists approach sleep is counterintuitive: the harder you try to sleep, the worse it often gets.
Dr. Emily Clark, a psychologist for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, advises athletes to aim for consistency, not perfection. That distinction matters more than it might seem. When sleep becomes a performance — something to optimize, achieve, or win — it takes on the same qualities as wakefulness. Your nervous system stays alert. Your mind monitors. Your body waits.
This pattern has a clinical name: sleep effort. It's a well-documented contributor to chronic insomnia, and it's the same trap elite athletes fall into when they check their sleep tracker scores in the morning and treat the number as a verdict on their day.
The antidote isn't indifference to sleep. It's reducing the stakes you've attached to it.
What Nighttime Rumination Actually Is
Moguls skier Tess Johnson described what many of my patients describe almost word for word: waking in the middle of the night and replaying scenarios — past performances, future fears, imagined outcomes. "I'll find myself waking up in the middle of the night, just kind of ruminating," she said.
Nighttime rumination isn't a character flaw or a sign that something is wrong with your thinking. It's what happens when your brain hasn't had a chance to process the day's emotional content before you ask it to go offline.
For athletes, that content is competition pressure. For the rest of us, it might be work stress, relationship tension, parenting worry, or financial anxiety. The mechanism is the same: your threat-detection system doesn't have an off switch, and nighttime is often the first quiet moment it has to run through its backlog.
What helps? The same techniques Olympic sleep consultants recommend:
Box breathing or slow, rhythmic breathing before bed to signal the nervous system that it's safe to downshift
A consistent wind-down routine that avoids emotionally activating content (yes, that means the doom-scrolling and high-stakes TV shows)
Journaling or a "worry window" — giving your brain a designated time to process concerns earlier in the evening, so it doesn't reserve that work for 2am
Anchor Your Wake Time, Not Just Your Bedtime
One of the most practical takeaways from how Olympic psychologists work with athletes is the emphasis on a consistent wake time rather than a fixed bedtime.
Dr. Jim Doorley, another USOPC psychologist, explains that your wake time is the most powerful anchor for your circadian rhythm — especially combined with morning light exposure. Bedtime can be flexible depending on when you're actually sleepy. Wake time should stay stable.
This is consistent with what we know from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which is the gold-standard, evidence-based treatment for chronic sleep difficulties. One of its core components — sleep restriction — works precisely because a consistent wake time gradually rebuilds sleep drive and consolidates fragmented nights.
If you're lying in bed for nine hours but only sleeping six of them, the bed has become a place of wakefulness as much as sleep. A stable wake time, even on weekends, starts to change that association.
Your Body Is More Resilient Than You Think
Perhaps the most therapeutically important message in how the USOPC approaches sleep is this: one bad night doesn't ruin everything.
Their sleep guidelines explicitly state that a single night of poor sleep "is rarely enough to derail your performance when you have adrenaline on your side and good sleep banked from prior nights." Dr. Doorley encourages athletes to cultivate what he calls a "childlike relationship to sleep" — sleeping when tired, not overthinking it, letting go.
This is easier said than done, especially for people who have spent months or years in a fraught relationship with their bed. But it points toward something real: much of what maintains insomnia isn't the original sleep disruption. It's the catastrophic meaning we assign to it.
"I didn't sleep — tomorrow is ruined." "If I don't fall asleep in the next twenty minutes, I won't function." "Something must be wrong with me."
These thoughts are understandable, but they're also treatable. CBT-I and other evidence-based approaches directly target the cognitive distortions that keep the sleep anxiety cycle running.
When to Seek Support
If you recognize yourself in any of this — the rumination, the sleep effort, the dread of bedtime — it's worth knowing that sleep anxiety and insomnia are among the most treatable conditions in mental health.
You don't have to be an Olympian managing peak performance to deserve good sleep. And you don't have to keep white-knuckling through it.
If sleep difficulties are affecting your mood, your relationships, your work, or your quality of life, that's a signal worth taking seriously — not as a personal failure, but as information that your system needs something different.
Citation
Huber, M. F. (2026, February 7). 5 Sleep Habits to Steal from Winter Olympians. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/well/sleep-winter-olympics-athletes.html
