Post-Performance Routines
“After a game, I can’t fall asleep until like 5am.”
“I got horrible sleep last night.”
“My boyfriend gets mad at me because I bring the game home with me.”
These are all quotes I got from athletes and business people within the past two weeks. Letting a game ruminate or a presentation affect your life outside of competition can lead to lack of sleep, stress, and ruin relationships with your significant other or roommates. Having your room set up for proper sleep is essential (check out Tyler’s Sleep Tips here), but what happens when the lights are off and your mind is still on? How do you shutdown after a high-stress day so that you can properly recover?
The solution: A Post-game Routine
The Post-Game Routine
Routines help us funnel into a focused state. If you think about your pre-performance routines, they are all to help you focus on the upcoming task better. They also help us come out of a high-focus state so we can relax and turn on the recovery.
One professional basketball coach I work with said that after games, regardless of if they won or lost, he would not be able to fall asleep until late into the night. His usual bedtime was 11pm and sometimes, he couldn’t fall asleep until 6 hours later.
So, we came up with a post-game routine to solve this problem.
He needed time to process the game, he needed to relax, and he needed to calm his mind. So, after each game, he makes sure he does what’s required for others (interviews, talk to fans, talk with team) and then goes and does what’s required for him (hot tub, meditation, and a healthy meal). His post-game routine looks like this:
Game Ends
Take breaths to get present for interview
Get culture involved in answers
Talk to fans
Go over DOC (defense, offense, culture) in the game, focus on good
Tell team to choose their most empowered response
Go to hot tub (meditate & think about game until ready to go eat)
Go to eat (no sugar, no bread, no alcohol)
PM routine
There are some key parts to his post-game routine that allow him to sleep well at night:
He focuses on the good around the performance. This keeps his thoughts in a productive and solution-based mode. Complaining and having unproductive conversations with himself only delays the process and keeps him stagnant. You can’t get better moving forward if you’re still trying to change what happened in the past. By the way, it’s impossible to change the past. It happened. As Jocko Willink says (check out the video), “Get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, re-engage – and go out on the attack.”
He relaxes in the hot tub (warm showers work as well). When your body is about to fall asleep, your core body temperature slightly drops. By taking a warm bath, you are heating it above normal. The cooling down after the bath is actually what relaxes you. Your body temperature drops, and therefore, the body starts to tell your brain, “Hey man, it’s time for sleep.” Meditation in this case is him thinking about the game. Meditation doesn’t just have to be thinking about nothing. This is what I call “Thinking Meditation.” It is where you think about one event and come up with your own answers.
He keeps his nutrition on lock down. Plenty of studies out there show how alcohol and nicotine delay the onset of sleep. Not only that, but more and more is being said about the harmful effects of processed sugar. One of them being that it increases inflammation. For any athlete or coach, sustained inflammation can lead to injury, fatigue, and/or fluctuations in mood. And I didn’t forget about bread. Look up pictures of heroin, cocaine, processed sugar, and flour. They all look the same, they all have the same addictive properties, and they are all harmful for the body.
If you look at his list, everything he does is there. This is called Pointing and Calling and I got it from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. Pointing and calling brings more awareness to your routines so that you can optimize them. Let’s take a look at another professional athlete I work with. He would jump into the interview without a game plan and would fumble over his words. He’d talk to the fans and then go straight out to eat dinner with friends and family. He’d order “whatever looked good” and then go home. Still stressed about the game, he’d crack open the Grey Goose and pour himself a drink. After writing down the original post-game routine, we discussed the different aspects of it, and decided on a course of action. A month later, he mentioned to me not about his sleep, but how he was able to show up to the complex with a more consistent energy (a product of good sleep).
What does your post-game routine look like?
Other stress reduction techniques involve:
Working out
Talking with a friend (stay solution-oriented)
Taking a walk (leave the phone at home)
Yoga
Hot bath
Hot shower
Meditating
Journaling
Praying
Reading
Listening to music
Getting a massage
Being creative
Here are also some activities we think are helping us, but according to the American Psychological Association, are actually are the LEAST EFFECTIVE stress-reduction strategies:
Gambling
Shopping
Smoking
Drinking
Playing video games
Surfing the internet
Watching the TV, Netflix, or Movies for more than two hours
Sidenote: We like to think that playing video games and surfing the internet or going on social media is making us feel better, because in the short-term, it does. Our brains are releasing dopamine and we “feel” better, but then we wake up in the morning and we’re still in a bad headspace. A proper post-game routine gives you time to think and come up with answers. These stress-reduction strategies that are the LEAST EFFECTIVE are LEAST EFFECTIVE because they distract you short-term and leave you feeling worse in the end, making you want to distract yourself more from the situation. It’s a destructive cycle.
The Wrap-Up
A solid post-game routine should help you decompress, reduce stress, and relax you. Take the time to add in useful and productive stress-reduction techniques. Three of the mainstays in a post-game routine with the athletes I work with are meditation or journaling, a hot shower or bath, and a healthy meal.
If you are looking to optimize your sleep, check out Tyler’s Sleep Tips
Through mindset and strategy APPLICATION, this mini series will not only help reduce stress, but you will sleep better, reduce anxiety, and increase focus. We’re all seeking fulfillment in life, and it starts with being just a little more mindful.
5 minutes a day for 5 days. 25 minutes that might just save your life.
Hanin, Yuri L. (1997). Emotions and athletic performance: Individual zones of optimal functioning model. European Yearbook of Sport Psychology, 1, 29-72.
Hanin, Y. L. (2000). Emotions in sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
