Science says: women need to sleep longer than men
Are you also always tired after a long workday? Or do you catch yourself needing a nap after three in the afternoon? Then you have a sleep deficit. And no, not from that one time you went to bed two hours later. It’s because of (yes really) your brain. We have actually discovered something in this progressive, science-rich century: we women need to sleep longer than men. How does that work? Just read on before you have another grumpy outburst from tiredness. Oops.
How we got to that 8-hour myth
Huh? But… wasn’t it said that you need seven to eight hours of sleep per night? Yes, that’s correct. We all thought that. But then again, we also thought we wouldn’t have another war with Germany. And that women were only made to bear children. It was an unfortunate year, 1939, when Nathaniel Kleitman figured out that adults should sleep eight hours. The physiologist opened the first sleep lab and was thus a true pioneer in the field of sleep. So it’s not surprising that we relied on that expert advice for a long time. It was extensively tested, so it must just be true. Right? Well, nowadays – almost a hundred years later – we know how the fork in the road is. It varies by person. Or actually: by gender. Because yes, it has now been discovered that women actually need to sleep longer than men.
Why do we need to sleep longer?
Well, it all has to do with our brain. We have actually known for a while that the upper room of women works just a bit differently than that of men: we are more emotional, think more, have more people knowledge – yes, that’s no news. We women are the organizers. Even though those men think they are the ‘real leaders’, it’s often women who secretly keep everything running. I see it daily: “Do you have your keys?” my mother shouts every morning before my father leaves the house. And seven out of ten times he doesn’t have them. From a young age, boys are pushed by their mothers, and in a marriage, that usually doesn’t change. We may be more emancipated than ever, but behind the scenes, we remain the silent engine of the household.
And exactly that multitasking is why women need more sleep. Researchers from the Loughborough University discovered that women use their brains more intensively because they continuously multitask. “Women’s brains are wired differently,” explains lead researcher Professor Jim Horne. Duh. As if we didn’t already know that. “They are much more busy doing everything at once, which burdens their brains more than men’s.” His research with two hundred subjects showed that women need about twenty minutes more sleep on average to recover properly. So yes: you can comfortably stay in bed a little longer. And for the resistance from the other side of the bed: this is no coincidence. A study from the Amen Clinics, which compared more than 46,000 brain scans of women and men, also showed that women have a more active brain on average. So that’s just a fact. Period.
That old concept is just ancient and was thought up by… yep. A man
Why are we only finding this out now? Well, because this is yet another case of science that was once conceived by men, for men. Everything we find ‘normal’ has largely been tested on their bodies. Typical, right? Just like many other things in the medical world, it took a while before someone thought: “Hey, maybe women’s bodies don’t work the same way at all.” We really didn’t see that coming (not). So, that famous advice of eight hours of sleep? That might work just fine for him, but we operate on a different system. Our hormones are on rollercoasters, our brains are working overtime, and in the meantime, we are also trying to manage the household, our careers, and our inner peace.
If you want to stay in bed a little longer tomorrow morning: no guilt. No shame. No snooze-judging. Just say it’s science. Because honestly? If anyone has the right to an extra hour of sleep – with a satin eye mask and without guilt – it’s us.
