Doctors know things about sleep that most of us don’t. A physician recently shared five of those things — insights that guide how sleep medicine professionals think about rest, recovery, and health. Leading the list is a finding that every woman should know: women need more sleep than men, and the reason is embedded in how the female brain processes a day’s worth of activity.
The physician attributes the gender sleep difference — approximately 20 minutes more per night for women — to multitasking. When the brain simultaneously manages multiple tasks, it works harder and more extensively than it does during focused, single-task activity. Women, on average, engage in this cognitively intensive mode of thinking more throughout the day, resulting in greater recovery demands that play out during sleep.
Sleep onset time is one of the clearest and most accessible indicators of overall sleep health. The physician identifies 10 to 20 minutes as the healthy range for falling asleep. Consistently falling asleep much faster often reflects significant, accumulated sleep deprivation. Consistently taking much longer — particularly when this is a nightly experience — may indicate insomnia or stress-related conditions that prevent the body from successfully entering sleep.
Dream amnesia is a nearly universal human experience. About 95 percent of dream content vanishes within minutes of waking, because dreams don’t get encoded into long-term memory during the sleep stages where they occur. The physician’s practical prescription for anyone wanting to hold onto their dreams: keep a journal bedside and write down whatever you can recall immediately upon waking, before the memory dissolves.
Two final rules round out the physician’s sleep insights. After 17 consecutive hours awake, cognitive function declines to a level comparable to 0.05 percent blood alcohol — impaired enough to matter for safety, judgment, and performance. And with melatonin, the most effective approach is to start very low: 0.5 mg mirrors natural brain secretion and is typically more effective than the high-dose options that dominate most supplement stores.
