Creatine and Sleep Deprivation: Can One Dose Improve Cognitive Performance?

🧠Article Difficulty: Easy / Moderate
🕒8 minute read 

Article Summary:

• Recently, a pioneering study investigated whether a single 25 g dose of creatine could reduce the cognitive and metabolic effects of one night of sleep deprivation. Researchers measured both brain energy metabolism and cognitive performance over approximately 21 hours without sleep.
• .
• Brain creatine levels increased by 4.2% within just a few hours of supplementation.
• .
• Creatine helped preserve the brain's energy supply by maintaining phosphocreatine and reducing markers of energy stress.
• .
• Compared with placebo, participants demonstrated improvements of approximately 8–29% across multiple measures of memory, processing speed, and fatigue. 

Summary findings:

Compared with placebo, participants experienced the following cognitive improvements after consuming a single ~25 g dose of creatine:

Cognitive Measure	Creatine Vs. Placebo
Word memory accuracy	+10.3%
Word memory processing speed	17.7% faster
Language task processing speed	29.1% faster
Logical reasoning processing speed	16.0% faster
Numerical reasoning processing speed	24.0% faster
Subjective fatigue	8% lower

Purpose of this article

The purpose of this article is to explain the findings of a particularly interesting study looking at the effects of a single dose of creatine on sleep-deprived cognitive performance in a clear and easy-to-understand way. I don't normally write blogs about one specific study; however, this one is worth covering.

Rather than making you read through the nitty-gritty, science-heavy terminology used in the original research paper, I've broken down the key findings so you can better understand how a single high dose of creatine may affect brain function and cognitive performance following sleep deprivation.

Background

Creatine has been extensively studied for its effects on sport and athletic performance. More recently, however, research has increasingly focused on its effects on cognitive performance, and specifically, research has found creatine's effects on cognition to be most pronounced during sleep deprivation (1), (2), (3). 

Much like in skeletal muscle, creatine supplementation increases phosphocreatine within brain cells, helping regenerate ATP, the brain's primary energy source. Greater ATP availability may enhance cognitive processing and overall brain function. While creatine's effects on cognition in well-rested individuals are mixed, there is convincing evidence that it can help reduce cognitive decline following sleep deprivation.

If you'd like to learn more about how creatine works in the body, I recommend reading my complete guide to creatine here. For now, we'll keep the science fairly simple and focus on the findings of this study.

Why this study is unique

Most studies investigating creatine and cognitive performance have used supplementation periods ranging from three to 28 days. However, this 2024 study investigated whether a single high dose of creatine could produce similar benefits after just one night of sleep deprivation.

Because creatine typically takes multiple days to accumulate within tissues, including the brain, it was unknown whether increasing the dose from a typical 5 g serving to approximately 25 g could increase brain creatine quickly enough to produce the same benefits as a traditional loading protocol. This is what the researchers set out to investigate.

Analysing The Study

Here is the link to the original study if you wish to read through it.

The study used the gold-standard protocol for clinical testing: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design. The trial involved 15 healthy young adults (average age 23 years). Because the study used a crossover design, each participant completed both the creatine and placebo conditions, meaning every participant served as their own control. This study design is optimal for research of this nature because it removes individual variability from confounding the results, thereby improving the reliability of the data.

Creatine Dosing Procedure

Participants received either: Creatine monohydrate: 0.35 g per kilogram of body weight
or a placebo (corn starch).

For a person weighing 70 kg (154 lb), this equates to approximately 24.5 g of creatine. The supplement was taken as a single dose at 8:30 pm.

Sleep Deprivation Protocol

After a normal night's sleep, participants remained awake for approximately 21 hours. Cognitive testing and brain measurements were performed at four time points:

• Baseline (around 6:00 pm)
• Midnight
• 2:00 am
• 4:00 am

This allowed the researchers to monitor how cognitive performance changed as participants became increasingly sleep deprived.

What Did the Researchers Measure?

Brain energy markers

The researchers used magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a specialised MRI technique, to examine changes in the brain's energy metabolism. They measured several markers involved in cellular energy production, including:

• Total creatine
• Phosphocreatine (PCr)
• ATP (the body's main energy currency)
• Inorganic phosphate (Pi)
• Brain pH

Together, these measurements provided insight into how well the brain was maintaining its energy supply as sleep deprivation progressed.

Cognitive tests

Participants completed a series of cognitive tests designed to measure several aspects of mental performance, including:

• Reaction time
• Word memory
• Short-term memory (digit span)
• Working memory (3-back task)
• Language reasoning
• Logical reasoning
• Numerical reasoning

What the Study Found

Brain creatine increased within hours

One of the most interesting findings was that brain creatine levels increased just a few hours after taking a single dose of creatine by 4.2%. These findings suggest that, during sleep deprivation, the brain may take up creatine much more rapidly than previously believed, or that higher doses of creatine simply lead to more rapid uptake by the brain.

Brain energy markers results

Compared with placebo, participants who consumed creatine showed several signs of better-preserved brain energy metabolism. Specifically, creatine:

• Prevented the rise in inorganic phosphate (Pi), a marker of energy stress.
• Helped maintain phosphocreatine (PCr), the brain's rapid energy reserve.
• Reduced the decline in brain pH, suggesting better maintenance of normal cellular metabolism.

Together, these findings indicate that creatine helped preserve the brain's high-energy phosphate system during sleep deprivation.

Cognitive performance results

In addition to preserving brain energy metabolism, creatine also improved performance on several cognitive tasks.

Compared with placebo, participants experienced:

Cognitive Measure	Creatine Vs. Placebo
Word memory accuracy	+10.3%
Word memory processing speed	17.7% faster
Language task processing speed	29.1% faster
Logical reasoning processing speed	16.0% faster
Numerical reasoning processing speed	24.0% faster
Subjective fatigue	8% lower

 

How does creatine improve cognitive performance during sleep deprivation?

There are two possible explanations for why creatine helps reduce cognitive fatigue during sleep deprivation. First, sleep deprivation may reduce the brain's energy reserves, meaning that prolonged mental effort is more likely to deplete available energy, allowing creatine to have a significant effect. Second, sleep deprivation itself may increase the brain's energy demands as tasks require more cognitive effort when sleep deprived, making additional phosphocreatine availability more beneficial (4).

The authors of the single-dose study proposed the following explanation, corresponding to the second of the two possible explanations above:

Practical takeaways

So, do you need to be taking 25 g of creatine to achieve good cognitive performance gains? The answer is no. This was simply the protocol used in this particular study as a single dose. However, numerous studies have used doses between 5–10 g over multiple days to weeks and achieved similar outcomes, with significant improvements in sleep-deprived cognitive performance (1), (2), (3) 

Therefore, if you are consuming creatine daily, which is the recommended approach for creatine supplementation, you certainly do not need to be taking 25 g at a time.

Although research has not directly compared different doses over time, I speculate that a daily dose of 10 g would be sufficient to maximise the cognitive benefits of creatine. Meanwhile, 3–5 g has been consistently shown to be sufficient for maximising skeletal muscle creatine uptake (5). However, creatine uptake into the central nervous system appears to be more resistant than uptake into skeletal muscle, which is why I speculate that 10 g per day may be a more appropriate recommendation for cognitive benefits.

Further learning

If you’re interested in learning more creatine and cognitive performance, I’ve written two papers on the topic covering much of what is currently known about its effects on cognition: an in-depth literature review examining the full body of research on creatine’s cognitive effects, and a research project I conducted with 12 participants in a double-blind, randomized controlled trial. In this study, participants received both creatine and placebo at different times and were tested on working memory performance before and after cognitive fatigue.

About the Author:

Joe is a certified personal trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and nutrition coach. He holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Sport and Exercise Science, graduating with First Class standing. During his studies, Joe focused on human physiology and performance, and he applies this knowledge of exercise science to his work with Thrive. He is the co-founder of Thrive Protein, a Canadian family-run supplement company focused on clean, scientifically backed nutrition products — including protein powders, greens, and electrolytes, creatine monohydrate.

References:

Killgore, W.D.S. (2003) 'Effects of sleep deprivation on cognition', Current Biology, 13(17), pp. R670–R672. doi:10.1016/S0960-9822(03)00135-0.

Van Cutsem, J., Roelands, B., Pluym, B., Tassignon, B., Verschueren, J., De Pauw, K., Meeusen, R. and Pattyn, N. (2020) 'Can creatine combat the mental fatigue-associated impairment in skilled performance?', Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 52(1), pp. 120–130. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000002119.

McMorris, T., Harris, R.C., Howard, A.N., Langridge, G., Hall, B., Corbett, J., Dicks, M. and Hodgson, C. (2007) 'Creatine supplementation, sleep deprivation, cortisol, melatonin and behaviour', Physiology & Behavior, 90(1), pp. 21–28. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2006.08.024.

McMorris, T., Harris, R.C., Swain, J., Corbett, J., Collard, K., Dyson, R.J., Dye, L., Hodgson, C. and Draper, N. (2006) 'Effect of creatine supplementation and sleep deprivation, with mild exercise, on cognitive and psychomotor performance, mood state, and plasma concentrations of catecholamines and cortisol', Psychopharmacology, 185(1), pp. 93–103. doi:10.1007/s00213-005-0269-z.

Harris, R.C., Söderlund, K. and Hultman, E. (2002) 'Elevation of creatine in resting and exercised muscle of normal subjects by creatine supplementation', Clinical Science, 83(3), pp. 367–374. doi:10.1042/cs0830367.

Persky, A.M. and Brazeau, G.A. (2001) 'Clinical pharmacology of the dietary supplement creatine monohydrate', Pharmacological Reviews, 53(2), pp. 161–176.

Gordji-Nejad, A., Pfeiffer, N., et al. (2024) 'Single-dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high-energy phosphates during sleep deprivation', Scientific Reports, 14, Article 6508. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-54249-9.