By: Neil Wattier, Mental Coach for Athletes, Parents, and Coaches
Have you ever nailed a new skill in practice, only to forget it the next day? Or struggled to remember what your coach said in a high-pressure moment? The way your brain processes and stores information is directly influenced by sleep and emotion—two things many young athletes and their parents often overlook when thinking about sport performance.
The latest research shows healthy emotional experiences help athletes remember skills better, and sleep plays a key role in locking in those memories. If you want to improve as an athlete, it’s not just about practicing harder—it’s about learning smarter. And that starts with understanding how sleep and emotions shape your performance..
“Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” – Vince Lombardi
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The Science: How Your Brain Learns and Remembers
Your brain is like a high-tech filing system. When you practice a skill, your brain decides whether it’s important enough to store as a long-term memory or forget to make room for other things. But here’s the catch: your brain doesn’t store everything equally.
Recent research shows healthy emotions during practice help your brain store information more effectively. When you enjoy what you’re learning, feel supported, or experience small wins, your brain’s amygdala (the emotional processing center) sends a message to other brain areas, saying, “This is important—remember this!”
But here’s where sleep comes in. These experiences and memories need to be reinforced to become long-lasting. This happens during non-REM sleep, a deep sleep stage where your brain replays experiences from the day, strengthening important skills and filtering out unnecessary information. If you don’t get enough sleep, your brain doesn’t get the chance to fully process and store those memories.
Now that we understand why sleep and emotion matter, let’s talk about how to use this science to improve your game.
5 Ways to Use Sleep and Emotion to Boost Your Performance
Make Training Enjoyable
The more you enjoy what you’re learning, the more likely your brain is to remember it. Coaches and parents play a key role in creating a positive, fun, and engaging environment for young athletes.
✅ For Athletes: Instead of dreading practice, find ways to challenge yourself in a fun way. Set mini-goals, compete against yourself, and celebrate small improvements.
✅ For Coaches & Parents: Encourage healthy reinforcement instead of focusing only on mistakes. A simple “That was a great effort!” or “You’re getting better every day!” can help an athlete’s brain flag the skill as important.
Get Enough Quality Sleep
Your brain can’t consolidate memories if you don’t get enough sleep—especially deep, non-REM sleep. A lack of sleep means skills you worked on today might not stick by tomorrow.
✅ For Athletes: Aim for at least 8-10 hours of sleep per night. Your body and brain need this time to recover, repair, and reinforce everything you’ve learned.
✅ For Coaches & Parents: Help young athletes develop good sleep habits. This means no screens before bed, consistent sleep schedules, and a calm, quiet sleep environment.
Use Healthy Emotions to Reinforce Skills
Emotions act like glue for memory. When a training session is connected to healthy emotions, the brain strengthens those memories more effectively.
✅ For Athletes: Try visualizing success before bed. Picture yourself executing a skill perfectly and focus on how it feels to succeed. This will help reinforce those movements in your brain.
✅ For Coaches & Parents: End practices with a positive note. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, highlight a win from practice. This helps an athlete’s brain retain what they did well and build confidence for the next session.
Review Skills Before Sleep
Studies show going over key skills before bed helps reinforce them during sleep. This is because the brain processes the most recent information more deeply.
✅ For Athletes: Before falling asleep, mentally review your best plays or skills from practice. Imagine yourself performing them smoothly and confidently. This strengthens the neural pathways needed for execution.
✅ For Coaches & Parents: Encourage athletes to journal or reflect on their best moments of the day. This can be as simple as writing, “I improved my shot accuracy today, and I felt great about it.”
Manage Stress to Maximize Learning
If an athlete is constantly stressed, their brain focuses more on survival than learning. High stress levels can actually block memory consolidation, making it harder to retain skills.
✅ For Athletes: Use breathing exercises, mindfulness, and relaxation techniques to stay calm and focused. A simple breathing exercise like 4-7-8breathing (inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, exhale through pursed lips for 8 seconds can help reduce stress and prepare the brain for learning.
✅ For Coaches & Parents: Avoid putting too much pressure on outcomes. Instead of saying, “You have to win this game,” shift the focus to effort and improvement, such as, “Give your best effort and focus on what you can control.”
Train Smarter, Not Just Harder
Becoming a great athlete isn’t just about grinding through endless hours of practice. It’s about training smarter, and that means using what we know about how the brain learns best.
Healthy emotions make learning stick. Enjoyment, encouragement, and small wins help your brain remember what matters.
Sleep strengthens memory. Without enough deep sleep, today’s progress might disappear by tomorrow.
Mental rehearsal before bed improves skills. Your brain continues learning even when you’re asleep.
If you want to level up your game, don’t just focus on how much you practice. Pay attention to how you practice, how you feel, and how you sleep.
Making a few small changes can train your brain to work with you, not against you—and that’s the real secret to becoming a high-performing athlete.
References
Saito, Y et al., (2025) Amygdalo-cortical dialogue underlies memory enhancement by emotional association. Neuron. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2025.01.001
Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-emotion-memory-28402/
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