You’ve Been Sleeping Wrong: Women Need More Sleep Than Men, Plus 4 Expert Revelations

Most people think they understand sleep. They know they should get seven to eight hours, they know screens before bed are bad, and they’ve probably tried melatonin at some point. But the nuances of sleep science go far deeper — and a physician recently shared five facts that reveal just how much most people are missing, starting with the fact that women need more sleep than men.
The additional sleep need for women is estimated at approximately 20 minutes per night. The physician ties this to multitasking — the mental process of managing multiple tasks simultaneously, which places greater demands on the brain’s processing and organizational systems. When those systems are taxed more heavily during the day, they need more time during sleep to reset and recover. This is a biological need, not a preference.
Sleep latency — the time between lying down and actually falling asleep — is an important but often ignored window into sleep health. The physician identifies 10 to 20 minutes as the normal, healthy range. Falling asleep significantly faster suggests possible sleep debt that deserves attention, while regularly taking 30 or more minutes to fall asleep can point to insomnia, which is highly treatable but often goes unaddressed.
On the subject of dreams, the physician notes that 95 percent are forgotten almost immediately after waking. This memory loss is structural — dreams occur during sleep stages that don’t effectively transfer content into long-term storage. The most practical response is to write down whatever you remember the very moment you wake up, before anything else commands your attention.
To close out the five facts: staying awake for 17 or more hours brings cognitive function down to a level similar to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 percent, impairing judgment and reaction time in meaningful ways. And with melatonin, the counterintuitive truth is that less works better — 0.5 mg aligns with the body’s natural production and is typically more effective than the high-dose options most commonly sold.