It’s official! Women need more sleep than men, roughly 20 minutes more per night according to scientists.
Here’s 6 reasons why…
1. Sleep is food for our brains. Jim Horne, a sleep neuroscientist and retired director of Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre, says a female brain works harder than males and so needs additional sleep to properly rest up and repair.
2. To maintain the ability to multitask. Women do lots at once and need to be flexible and so they use more of their actual brain than men do says Horne.
3. To stop us from going mad. For women, poor sleep is strongly associated with high levels of psychological distress and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger. These feelings were not associated with the same degree of sleep disruption in men.
4. To stay in shape. Sleep loss has been linked to increased appetite, which can be bad news for both sexes. A study revealed that women who are poor sleepers tend to be more overweight than men with sleep problems.
5. To reduce the chances of hypertension. Women who move around in the night have higher levels of C-reactive protein than men, linking to high blood pressure and heart disease.
6. It’s in our genetic makeup. Oestrogen is known to have an anti-inflammatory effect, so the decline as we get older could contribute to poor sleep and to feeling worse after a night of disrupted sleep.
