Sleep secrets aren’t really secrets — they’re findings that haven’t yet reached the mainstream. A physician is changing that by sharing five important sleep facts that most people have never been formally taught. Among them, the finding that women need more sleep than men is both the most surprising and the most immediately actionable.
The physician explains that women may require around 20 additional minutes of nightly sleep compared to men. The reason lies in multitasking — a cognitively intensive mode of operation that puts significant demands on the brain’s executive functions throughout the day. More cognitive demand during the day means more recovery work for the brain to accomplish during sleep, resulting in a meaningfully higher sleep requirement for many women.
How quickly — or slowly — you fall asleep is a meaningful health indicator. Falling asleep should take 10 to 20 minutes under normal, healthy circumstances. If you regularly fall asleep faster, your body may be running on a sleep deficit that has grown large enough to accelerate sleep onset dramatically. If it consistently takes much longer, your nervous system may be struggling to disengage from the day’s stimulation, which can indicate insomnia or chronic stress.
Dreams are almost entirely forgotten, and this is a consistent finding across sleep research. Approximately 95 percent of dream content disappears within minutes of waking, because dreams are generated during sleep phases that don’t prioritize long-term memory encoding. To capture your dreams, write them down the moment you wake up — even fragmentary notes or single images can anchor the memory and allow for more detailed reconstruction.
Two more facts round out the physician’s list. After 17 hours without sleep, cognitive function declines to a level comparable to having a 0.05 blood alcohol concentration — enough to impair judgment and reaction time significantly. And with melatonin supplements, starting with just 0.5 mg is the physician’s recommendation, as this amount closely mirrors the body’s natural secretion and tends to be more effective than the higher doses commonly sold in stores.
Unlocking Sleep Secrets: Women Need More Sleep Than Men — Plus 4 Facts That Change the Game
