Exploring associations between sleep duration and performance as well as heart rate variability in elite esports athletes

Sleep is essential for overall well-being, influencing physical, psychological, and mental health. While research shows that increasing sleep enhances athletic performance, data on the relationship between performance, sleep, and stress response in esports athletes remains limited. Our study aims to explore sleep counseling and its associations on neurocognitive function, gaming performance, and heart rate variability in esports. We enrolled competitive Valorant esports athletes. Participants maintained their regular sleep schedule for four to six weeks, followed by an attempted four-week sleep extension phase. Health data were collected via a wearable device. We evaluated individual performance through neurocognitive tests and by analyzing participants' weekly match statistics. The study revealed that participants did not significantly increase sleep duration (p = 0.265). We observed improvements in neurocognitive test reaction times (p < 0.01) but not gaming performance. Sleep counseling was also associated with improved heart rate variability (p < 0.05), though the effect size was small. Overall, this study highlights the difficulty of implementing behavioral sleep interventions in elite esports athletes and the need for alternative or more targeted approaches. While the intervention did not achieve significant sleep extension and therefore constrained causal inference, the study demonstrates the feasibility of a rigorous methodological framework for investigating sleep and performance in esports athletes.