Ignoring sleep science comes at a cost. When we don’t understand what our bodies need, we make decisions that compromise our health — and for women, one of the most consequential pieces of missing knowledge is this: women need more sleep than men. A physician recently highlighted this finding alongside four others that deserve far more attention than they currently receive.
The physician explains that women may need approximately 20 more minutes of sleep per night than men. The reason is cognitive: many women engage in more multitasking throughout the day — simultaneously managing multiple tasks, responsibilities, and streams of thought. This intensive cognitive activity requires more from the brain’s processing and organizational systems, which then need more time during sleep to recover, consolidate, and restore themselves fully.
Sleep latency — the time it takes to fall asleep — is a useful but often-ignored health indicator. The healthy range is 10 to 20 minutes. Consistently falling asleep much faster may indicate that the body is severely sleep-deprived — the brain is shutting down from exhaustion rather than transitioning naturally into rest. Consistently taking much longer may point to insomnia or chronic stress that’s keeping the nervous system in an alert, activated state.
Dream loss is nearly universal. About 95 percent of dream content is forgotten within minutes of waking, because dreams are generated in sleep states that don’t support long-term memory encoding. If you want to preserve your dreams, the physician recommends writing them down the moment you wake up — before conversation, screens, or any other activity takes your attention and the fragile dream memories dissolve.
The physician’s final two insights are directly actionable. Seventeen hours without sleep produces cognitive impairment comparable to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent — enough to meaningfully affect judgment, reaction time, and decision-making. And when using melatonin, starting with just 0.5 mg — an amount that mirrors the body’s natural secretion — is recommended over the higher doses that are commonly marketed and widely assumed to be more effective.
