From Melatonin to Gender Sleep Gaps: Women Need More Sleep Than Men, Doctor Explains

Sleep advice is everywhere, but accurate, evidence-based sleep information is harder to come by. A physician recently offered five sleep insights grounded in research — covering everything from the mechanics of falling asleep to the gender-based differences in how much sleep people need. At the top of the list: women need more sleep than men, a finding supported by multiple lines of evidence.
The physician attributes the additional sleep need — roughly 20 minutes per night for women — to the cognitive demands of multitasking. Managing multiple tasks, responsibilities, and thought processes simultaneously requires more from the brain throughout the day. Sleep is when the brain does its most intensive organizing and restorative work, and a heavier daytime workload means more work to do overnight.
Sleep onset time is more revealing than most people know. Falling asleep should take between 10 and 20 minutes — a window that reflects healthy tiredness without excessive depletion. Consistently falling asleep faster can be a red flag for sleep deprivation. Consistently taking longer may suggest insomnia, anxiety, or other factors preventing the body from successfully shifting into sleep mode.
Dreams are reliably forgotten. About 95 percent of dream content disappears within minutes of waking, because dreams are generated in brain states that don’t support long-term memory encoding. If you want to preserve your dreams, the solution requires both preparation and immediacy: keep a journal close to your bed and write the moment you wake up, before any other activity pulls your attention away.
The physician’s final two points round out the picture. Seventeen hours of continuous wakefulness brings cognitive performance down to a level comparable to 0.05 percent blood alcohol — a significant impairment with real safety implications. And with melatonin, the best dose is often the smallest: 0.5 mg mirrors what the body naturally secretes and tends to support the sleep-wake cycle more effectively than the high-dose options that dominate supplement shelves.