Sleep education: Temperature regulating tech and strategies to benefit sleep habits

Most elite sports teams and organisations have delivered some version of “the sleep talk.” We book a room, we run through the slides, we show the recovery pyramid, and we finish with the same hope: surely now they’ll go to bed earlier.

Sometimes that hope is rewarded.

More often, two weeks later, we’re back where we started: late bedtimes, inconsistent wake times, and athletes who can recite the rules but still can’t execute them when the week gets busy or they get distracted by doom-scrolling social media.

That tension is worth unpacking. Sleep education can improve sleep in the short term, but those gains often fade unless the message is reinforced and the environment supports the behaviour.^[1–3]

Practitioners also have to be clear about who education is most likely to help. Sleep hygiene education tends to be most effective for athletes whose sleep is compromised by modifiable behaviours, e.g., inconsistent schedules, late caffeine, or poor wind-down routines.

It has less effect when it’s approached as a stand-alone solution for athletes with an underlying sleep disorder such as chronic insomnia or obstructive sleep apnoea.^[4,5] Screening, referral, and evidence-based treatment pathways are more appropriate for those athletes.

Along with education, a range of sleep-promoting gadgets have gained a lot of attention in sport.

One that may hold some promise is temperature-controlled mattress toppers. These change the sleep environment without relying on the athlete to summon discipline at the end of a long day. That level of in-the-moment choice can be the difference between an intervention that is well understood and one that is actually used.

This article tackles two questions that come up repeatedly in high performance settings.

First, does educating athletes about sleep meaningfully improve their sleep? Second, do temperature-controlled mattress systems help athletes sleep better, and if so, why?

Sleep education: Effective but transient

Sleep education (or “sleep hygiene” education) refers to structured guidance aimed at improving sleep by changing day-to-day behaviours and the sleep environment.

It usually covers topics such as keeping a consistent sleep schedule, optimising the bedroom (cool, dark, quiet), managing caffeine and alcohol timing, optimising light exposure (bright light in the morning, dim lights at night), developing a wind-down routine, optimal napping methods, and using strategies to down-regulate arousal after training or competition.

Targeted education can improve athletes’ sleep outcomes. Personalised content anchored to the athletes’ actual individual behaviours increases the effectiveness of sleep education.

In elite female netball players, a single one-hour sleep hygiene education session improved (increased) total sleep time by about 22 minutes, alongside improvements in wake-related variability metrics.^[2]

For elite athletes, 15-30 minutes of extra daily sleep can be meaningful across a training block. It can shift how athletes feel, how they recover, and how they tolerate load.

A more individualised approach produced larger changes in key sleep metrics for elite cricketers.

After baseline monitoring, the athletes received group education plus individualised sleep hygiene advice that was informed by individual sleep behaviour profiling. Subsequent monitoring showed that the intervention improved sleep efficiency, reduced sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep), and reduced sleep onset variance.^[3] Subjective sleep measures improved, as well.^[3]

However, a longer study in professional rugby league players uncovered a different story.

These players attended two brief sleep hygiene education seminars. After the first seminar, the education group shifted bedtime earlier and increased time in bed and sleep duration. After the second seminar, time in bed improved again.

Most importantly, and unfortunately, when researchers checked back one month later, sleep behaviour was similar to baseline.^[1] Education created some temporary behaviour shifts, but those benefits did not hold.

That pattern should feel familiar to all of us. Watching a seminar or reading a self-help book spurs attention, and that attention creates a temporary change. But then our schedule and habits reassert themselves, and we fall back into old patterns unless we consciously stick to the new behaviours.

Elite sport is highly variable and volatile. One good week of sleep can be undone quickly by late games, the outcome of games, travel, early starts, and training blocks that push load and appetite later into the evening.

Put these findings together and you reach a conclusion that is both optimistic and realistic.

Education can improve sleep in elite athletes, but it often behaves like an acute intervention. Maintenance is the hard part, especially when the context keeps delivering the same barriers.

Across domains, education sticks best when athletes can clearly see how it connects to performance. Sleep is no exception.

When I speak with teams, I often use a preseason rugby union study as a simple example. The athletes who slept the most across the training block tended to show better improvements in key fitness and body composition measures.

The link between temperature and sleep is not just comfort. Supporting the body’s normal night-time cooling reduces the number of awakenings. During sleep, the body can prioritise many performance-relevant processes: hormonal regulation, tissue repair, immune function, learning and memory, and circadian rhythm alignment.^[10]

When sleep is more consolidated (fewer awakenings), athletes also tend to feel better the next day: more energy, better mood, and better readiness to train.

That kind of direct link between sleep and performance gives athletes and practitioners a reason to care, because it shifts sleep from a well-being topic to a performance foundation.^[6]

Why athletes revert to baseline habits

Knowledge is rarely the limiting factor. Most elite athletes already believe sleep matters.

The limiting factors are friction and trade-offs: late training, elevated arousal after competition, screen use as down-regulation, social rhythms, travel and unfamiliar beds, caffeine timing, early starts, and the mental load of trying to manage multiple performance demands.

There is also a cultural element.

In some environments, sleep is treated as a private matter. The athlete is expected to handle sleep on their own, and alone.

The message drifts towards being an implicit notion that “sleep is important, so you should fix your sleep.” That framing tends to blame the athlete and ignore the role of scheduling, travel demands, and training design.

A more productive framing is that sleep is a shared performance asset. Athletes own their choices, but programs own the environment. That includes training times, late-night administrative expectations, travel planning, and recovery scheduling.

When the environment supports sleep, athletes do not need hero-level discipline to comply.

Regular reminders of the why and how of sleep hygiene

If you want education to stick, treat it like strength training. One session can create an acute response, but adaptation requires repeated exposure, feedback, and progression.

This often looks like micro-education: short reminders delivered at the right time, such as after late matches, during travel blocks, or when early starts are unavoidable. Perhaps it is a visually appealing infographic in the locker room, or a quick message to the team WhatsApp group to remind them of key points. It could be the odd check-in with a sleep questionnaire or monitoring via a sleep wearable at various points of the season.

Rather than relying on one “sleep person” to occasionally deliver these messages, the performance practitioners should work together to deliver unified, consistent messaging about sleep.^[5] Athletes often receive sleep advice from multiple staff: medical, coaches, psychology, sport science, strength & conditioning, nutrition. Because they each bring their domain-specific knowledge and experiences, they can deliver mixed—potentially conflicting—messages. That can reduce adherence.

Sleep specialists should be part of the performance staff’s professional education: let the experts up-skill the staff so they can reinforce sleep principles in day-to-day contexts.^[5]

For example, the strength & conditioning coach can link sleep to training availability, readiness, and adaptation. They can also help manage late training or congested schedules.

Nutrition staff can align meal timing and evening fuelling to support thermoregulation and reduce gastrointestinal disruption.

Medical staff can lead screening for sleep disorders and manage referral pathways. Psychologists can contribute strategies for down-regulating arousal and managing stress-related insomnia. Sport scientists / analysts can support monitoring and feedback loops, translating sleep data into simple, actionable insights.

The key is coordination. The performance or medical lead may be best placed to align the messages across disciplines. A designated “sleep lead,” with qualified sleep expertise, would oversee the sleep education framework, content, and escalation pathways when a problem is identified.^[5]

Out cold: Temperature and sleep

We often talk about sleep as if it is only about behaviour: bedtimes, screens, caffeine.

But one of the most powerful and most overlooked drivers of sleep quality is temperature. The human body is built to fall asleep as core temperature is dropping, and to wake as it rises toward the morning.

A key part of the temperature decline is heat loss through the skin. Vasodilation in the hands and feet helps move heat from the core to the periphery. When the body can’t lose heat effectively because the person goes to sleep with an elevated body temperature, the individual is wearing too much clothing to bed, there’s heavy bedding, a hot bedroom, or elevated metabolic heat, sleep onset can be delayed and sleep can feel lighter and choppier.

Sport can make all of these adverse conditions nearly unavoidable. Hard training, late finishes, travel, unfamiliar beds, and high stress make it easy to get (and stay) too hot at the wrong time of day.

Setting the right body temperature before bed

The goal isn’t to chase a perfect temperature. It’s to create the conditions that help the body lose heat before bed and stay thermally comfortable overnight.

Meal timing and composition

Eating too close to bedtime increases metabolic heat production (diet-induced thermogenesis); and can keep core temperature elevated. Higher core temperature makes it harder to initiate sleep, and increases the chance of lighter, more fragmented sleep.^[7]

Athletes who struggle to “switch off” and who often feel warm at night usually do better when their last large meal finishes 2–3 hours before bed. Any further ingestion should be small and easy to digest, e.g., a light snack rather than a full meal).

Timing and intensity of training

Evening training can push temperature, adrenaline, and arousal later into the night.

After very hard sessions or congested competition, athletes often carry a higher sympathetic activation and higher heat load into the evening. Most evening exercise isn’t inherently bad for sleep. But higher intensity work ending within one hour of bed can impair sleep onset latency and sleep efficiency.^[8]

If late training is unavoidable, the priority becomes managing the cool-down period.

Hot and cold strategies

A warm shower or bath in the two hours before bed can sound counterintuitive when we are talking about lowering body temperature to improve sleep. But it often helps because it increases blood flow to the skin and promotes heat loss once you step out, a bigger “after-drop”.^[9]

Actively cooling the sleep environment with a fan, breathable bedding, or air conditioning can reduce thermal discomfort and night waking, especially in warm climates or for athletes who “run hot.”

Chronic sleep restriction and sleep debt

When sleep is repeatedly delayed—whether due to travel, late-night social media scrolling, or competition schedule—the circadian temperature rhythm drifts later into the night. That leaves the body’s natural rhythms less well aligned with the desired bedtime.

Athletes may feel sleepy but still struggle to drop off because the thermoregulatory “permission” for sleep hasn’t arrived yet.

Resetting the circadian rhythm starts with protecting a consistent wake time where possible. Once that is well-established, then gradually shift bedtime earlier. Going to bed early is insufficient as a one-off fix when the body clock and temperature rhythm are shifted later.

Temperature-controlled mattress toppers

One of the key components to sleep education is to “keep your room cool.” But this can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

Temperature-controlled mattress systems are gaining momentum in sport as a way to help athletes sleep. They are increasingly visible on social media, with athletes starting to pick up sponsorships and endorsing their use. Some that you might see or hear athletes talking about are Eight Sleep, Oak Sleep, and Chili-Pad.

What are they, and how do they work?

Temperature-controlled mattress toppers are exactly what they sound like. They are a thin cover that goes on top of the mattress and can warm or cool the bed surface while you sleep. Most systems do this by running temperature-controlled water through small channels in the cover. This means they can change the temperature right where it matters: where your skin meets the bed. That distinction is important, because most “too hot” sleep problems are not caused by the whole room being warm, but by the bed microclimate becoming warm and stuffy, especially under heavy bedding.

Some of the systems also layer in sensors and AI-style algorithms that track patterns over time—sleep timing, restlessness, heart rate, and room conditions—and then automatically adjust the temperature through the night. These systems “learn” how you sleep and adapt the temperature profile to keep you comfortable and reduce warm awakenings. You don’t need to do anything to adjust these settings.

The pitch is essentially personalised thermoregulation. Sleep is tightly linked to thermoregulation. In the hours before sleep, the body naturally tries to lose heat. When core body temperature is falling, it is easier to fall asleep.

When the body struggles to offload heat, sleep onset can be delayed and sleep can become lighter and more fragmented. This is why athletes often report poor sleep after late training or competition when they go to bed warm, and why hot hotel rooms can be a problem.

A cooling mattress topper may make it easier for the body to dump heat, reducing the sensation of being too warm and lowering the chance of waking up sweaty or restless in the middle of the night. The practical appeal is that it is a passive intervention.

Evidence supporting mattress toppers

Our recent (unpublished) study on 32 AFL athletes using a temperature-controlled mattress cover was encouraging on outcomes that matter in high performance settings: perceived sleep quality and overall sleep experience.

Compared with a control group, the temperature-controlled group improved several subjective sleep outcomes and had greater total sleep duration (+29 minutes per night) over a two-week period.

Athletes also reported high satisfaction with the system and perceived benefits to sleep and recovery.

That matters from a practical standpoint. An intervention that produces improvements in perceived sleep quality and adds around half an hour of sleep across a short period is meaningful in a setting where sleep is often under pressure.

Elite sport frequently adopts interventions because athletes feel better and can train better, even while the mechanisms are still being refined or simply understood. Of course, we have to be attuned to expectancy effects. But we should not dismiss a consistent perception signal, particularly when the intervention is passive, helping adherence to be high.

Anecdotally, I have successfully used temperature-controlled mattress toppers with Paralympic athletes with spinal cord injuries (SCI).

These athletes often struggle to regulate body temperature because SCI can disrupt autonomic control—including sweating and blood flow responses—below the level of injury. This is especially the case in warm environments or when bedding traps heat.

Several athletes who have trialled the toppers have told me it has “changed their life,” largely because they can stay asleep longer without frequent heat-related awakenings.

Some of our other work with non-athletic healthy adults using a temperature-controlled mattress cover resulted in reported improvements in daily perceived sleep and perceived sleep quality.

However, there was less change in objective sleep and biometric measures.^[11]

This pattern suggests that this intervention may first and most reliably influence comfort and perception. Objective changes may occur later, be smaller, be more context-dependent, or be harder to detect without specific conditions where temperature is a limiting factor.^[11] There may also be a lag in perceptual measures converting to objective findings, as the intervention period was only one week.

Another recent study in healthy adults adds further promise for this intervention.

In a crossover design, adults who slept with an active temperature-controlled cover switched “on” had improved sleep metrics compared to when they slept with it turned “off.”

Switching on the temperature-regulating system prompted more deep sleep (about 14 minutes in the first half of the night for cooler settings), more REM sleep (about 9 minutes), and small but significant improvements in overnight cardiovascular recovery markers (lower sleeping HR and higher HRV).^[12]

Those results suggest these systems can do more than just “feel nicer.” They may meaningfully influence sleep architecture and recovery physiology when temperature is manipulated across different parts of the night.^[12]

Downsides and unknowns

Of course, these devices come with a fairly hefty price tag. They are also not practical for travelling.

Indeed, there is a question around using this technology at home and becoming reliant on it, making it difficult to be without it when travelling.

The obvious next step is larger trials in athletes across different contexts, and longer term studies.

We need studies in both hot and cold environments, in congested competition schedules, and across all phases of the competitive season in athletes. There are also remaining questions about how this type of technology may benefit female athletes across the menstrual cycle, and how athletes with various impairments (e.g., SCI) might be able to leverage this technology to improve their sleep.

Remembering the big rocks of sleep

When teams ask “What should we prioritise?” I come back to two big rocks: a repeatable sleep routine and a sleep-supportive environment.

These are the foundations that make everything else easier to execute. They matter whether the goal is better sleep quality, faster recovery, or simply fewer “bad nights” across a season.

The elements of a good sleep routine are a consistent wake time (as much as sport allows), a predictable wind‑down of 20-40 minutes, and a clear off-ramp from stimulation. That off-ramp can be simple: dim lights; relaxing activities like stretching, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, reading, or listening to music; reduce stimulating activities; avoid heavy cognitive work.

Any or all of those feed into a cue-based routine—same order, same time—so the brain recognises “sleep is coming.”

The sleep environment should be dark, quiet, and cool: like a cave, but with comfortable bedding. Where “dark” and “quiet” might be hard to control, like hotels, athletes should always pack eye masks and earplugs, just in case.

The best programs treat sleep as a shared performance asset. Consistent messaging, smart scheduling, and targeted tools that the athletes will actually use set athletes up for a good night of sleep.

Sleep education can best improve athletes’ sleep when it is personalised, reinforced regularly, and supported by a training and travel environment that makes good sleep the easy choice.

Temperature-controlled mattress systems offer a promising “set and forget” option that targets a key physiological lever: thermoregulation. But like anything else in sport performance, the “icing on top of the cake” strategies and high-tech gadgets should only enter the picture once the basics of sleep hygiene are locked in.