Doctor’s Sleep Guide Confirms: Women Need More Sleep Than Men — Here’s Why It Matters

The question of how much sleep each person needs is more complicated than it might appear. Factors like age, health status, stress levels, and gender all play a role. A physician has highlighted five key facts that reveal this complexity — and the most practically important of them is this: women need more sleep than men, and understanding why matters for health outcomes.
The reason is rooted in brain activity. Women, on average, engage in more multitasking throughout the day — simultaneously managing multiple tasks, responsibilities, and streams of thought. This cognitively intensive mode of operation places greater demands on the brain’s executive and processing systems. Sleep is when those systems do their most important recovery work, and a heavier workload means more recovery time needed — approximately 20 additional minutes per night compared to men.
Sleep onset time is an underappreciated health indicator. The physician identifies a window of 10 to 20 minutes as ideal. Falling asleep much faster than this, on a regular basis, may be a sign of significant sleep debt — the body is so exhausted that it crashes almost immediately. Falling asleep much more slowly, consistently, may indicate insomnia or chronic anxiety that’s keeping the nervous system from fully unwinding.
Dreams, despite their often-intense emotional and narrative content, are almost entirely lost every morning. About 95 percent of dream content disappears within minutes of waking, because it’s generated in sleep states that don’t effectively encode memories. To preserve your dreams, the physician recommends keeping a journal at the bedside and writing immediately upon waking — the moment that window closes, the memories typically vanish completely.
The physician’s final two facts are directly applicable to daily life. After 17 consecutive hours awake, cognitive performance declines to a level comparable to mild intoxication, affecting judgment and reaction time in ways that matter for both safety and productivity. And with melatonin, restraint is the key: 0.5 mg mirrors what the body naturally produces and tends to be more effective than the larger doses marketed as standard in most supplement stores.