- Women’s tendency to multitask means they need extra sleep
- …but not as much as some social media influencers have suggested
- READ MORE: A habit of sleeping late at night can shorten your life by decades
It’s a bold and somewhat surprising claim.
According to health guru and author Dr. Patrick Flynn, a self-proclaimed hormone expert, women need one to two extra hours of sleep per night.
In a recent post he shared with his 324,000 Instagram followers, Dr. Flynn claimed that women need “8 to 10 hours of sleep,” while men only need “7 to 8 hours.”
He suggested this was due to differences in hormonal fluctuations between men and women, meaning sleep deprivation “puts more stress on a woman’s body than on a man’s body.”
Dr. Patrick Flynn, who calls himself ‘the hormone whisperer’, says women sometimes need more than two hours of extra sleep a night to avoid ‘extra stress’ on their bodies.
However, the American Association of Sleep Medicine guidelines say otherwise; recommending at least seven hours a night for everyone’adults from 18 to 60 years.
So what is the truth?
The answer, according to science, is that women probably need more sleep than men, but not as much as Dr. Flynn suggests.
Researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed the minutes of sleep collected from nationally representative samples of working-age adults in the American Time Use Surveys from 2003 to 2007.
They found that women generally slept more than men: just over 11 minutes.
“Much of the gap is explained by work and family responsibilities,” the researchers said.
Researchers have observed that women spend more time on unpaid work and family care.
Women wake up more often than men to care for their family members, which can disrupt their sleep and lead to them needing more.
Meanwhile, a study from Loughborough University compared a group of 210 middle-aged men and women.
The study found that, on average, women need at least 20 minutes more sleep than men.
Experts suggest that men probably need slightly more sleep than men, especially because of the complex tasks they often perform in one sitting.
The study suggested that women need extra sleep because their brains work harder due to multitasking.
‘One of the most important functions of sleep is to allow the brain to recover and repair itself,’ says Professor Jim Horne, Director of Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre.
‘During deep sleep, the cortex – the part of the brain responsible for memory of thoughts, language and so on – disconnects from the senses and goes into recovery mode.
‘The more of your brain you use during the day, the more of it needs to recover and therefore the more sleep you need.’
He added: ‘Women tend to multitask – they do a lot at once and are flexible – so they use more of their actual brain than men. As a result, their need for sleep is greater.
‘A man with a complex job that involves a lot of decision-making and lateral thinking may also need more sleep than the average man, but probably still not as much as a woman.’
Professor Horne said: ‘This is because women’s brains are wired differently to men’s and are more complex, so their need for sleep will be slightly greater. The average is twenty minutes longer, but some women may need a little more or less.’
There is also a hormonal element to the discrepancy.
Australian doctor Dr Carmel Harrington said increasing levels of the sex hormone progesterone, which occur in the last two weeks of a woman’s monthly cycle, have a calming effect, meaning women need more sleep.
Around this time, women should sleep at least half an hour longer than usual, she said.
“As we approach the end of our cycle, many of us experience PMT (premenstrual tension), which makes us feel irritable, cranky or emotional,” she said. ‘And those are also the hallmarks of sleep deprivation.’
Another 2016 study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany compared 160 adults of both sexes and found that women need to sleep longer to restore brain power.