Prescriptions for better health don’t always come in pill form. Sometimes they come in the form of information — the kind that changes how you understand your body and what it needs. A physician recently delivered exactly that kind of prescription with five sleep facts, beginning with a finding that should reshape how women think about rest: women need more sleep than men.
The physician notes that women may require around 20 additional minutes of sleep per night. The reason is tied to the cognitive demands of multitasking. Women, research suggests, tend to engage in more simultaneous cognitive processing throughout the day — managing multiple tasks, responsibilities, and streams of thought at once. This places greater demands on the brain’s processing systems, which then need more time during sleep to recover, consolidate, and restore themselves.
Sleep latency — the time it takes to fall asleep — is an accessible and revealing indicator of sleep health. The healthy range is 10 to 20 minutes. If you regularly fall asleep much faster, it may indicate that your body’s sleep reserves are depleted. If you consistently take much longer, your nervous system may be struggling to disengage from the day, which could indicate insomnia or elevated stress levels.
Dream loss is nearly universal. About 95 percent of dream content disappears within minutes of waking, because the sleep stages in which dreams occur don’t effectively encode content into long-term memory. For those interested in their dream lives, the physician’s recommendation is simple and practical: write down whatever you remember the moment you wake up, before any other stimulus or activity takes your attention.
The remaining two facts carry real-world implications. After 17 consecutive hours of wakefulness, cognitive performance declines to a level comparable to mild intoxication — approximately 0.05 blood alcohol concentration. This impairment is genuine and affects judgment, reaction time, and complex thinking. And with melatonin, choosing a low dose — specifically 0.5 mg — is likely to produce better results than the high-dose options that are most prominently marketed.