5 Sleep Facts Every Person Should Know — Including Why Women Need More Sleep Than Men

There are some health facts so fundamental that ignoring them comes at a genuine cost. Sleep is at the top of that list — and a physician has recently highlighted five specific facts within sleep science that deserve far more attention than they currently receive. The most universally applicable is this: women need more sleep than men, and knowing why can change how both women and men approach their nightly rest.
The gender sleep gap is estimated at around 20 minutes per night. The physician attributes this to the cognitive demands of multitasking — the kind of simultaneous, multi-threaded thinking that requires the brain to work harder and process more. Because many women engage in this mode of thinking more extensively throughout the day, their brains accumulate a greater recovery deficit, requiring more sleep to fully restore cognitive function overnight.
Sleep onset time — the time it takes to go from wakefulness to sleep — matters more than most people realize. Healthy sleep onset falls in the 10-to-20-minute window. If you’re asleep before your head fully hits the pillow, your body may be signaling extreme depletion. If you’re still lying awake after 30 or 40 minutes regularly, it’s worth discussing potential insomnia or sleep disruption with a healthcare professional.
Dreams are fascinating but frustratingly fleeting. The physician confirms that about 95 percent of dream content is lost within minutes of waking. Dreams are generated during sleep phases that don’t facilitate long-term memory storage, which is why even vivid, emotionally intense dreams fade so quickly. Writing them down immediately — before conversation, before your phone, before coffee — is the most effective way to preserve what you can.
Two final insights round out the physician’s list. Staying awake for 17 consecutive hours degrades cognitive function to a level comparable to having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 percent — a comparison that makes the danger of extreme sleep deprivation vividly clear. And with melatonin, less is genuinely more: 0.5 mg mirrors natural secretion levels and tends to support sleep more effectively than the much higher doses that are commonly marketed.