Taking sleep seriously isn’t just about feeling rested — it’s about protecting your long-term health, cognitive performance, and emotional stability. A physician recently shared five facts that make a compelling case for why sleep deserves far more of our attention and care. First and foremost among them: women need more sleep than men, a finding that should change how women — and the people around them — think about rest.
The physician notes that women may need approximately 20 more minutes of sleep each night. This isn’t an arbitrary difference — it’s tied to the cognitive demands that many women navigate throughout the day. Multitasking, or the simultaneous management of multiple tasks and responsibilities, places greater demands on the brain’s processing systems. When those systems work harder during the day, they need more recovery time during sleep at night.
Sleep onset time is a metric worth tracking for anyone interested in their sleep health. The physician describes a window of 10 to 20 minutes as normal. Falling asleep in under five minutes on a regular basis could indicate significant sleep deprivation — the brain is so exhausted that it shuts down rapidly. Regularly taking 30 or more minutes to fall asleep may indicate insomnia, anxiety, or other treatable conditions affecting sleep initiation.
Dreams, despite how vivid they can feel, are almost entirely gone from memory within minutes of waking. About 95 percent of dream content is lost because it doesn’t make it into long-term memory storage. Dreams occur in sleep stages that prioritize other kinds of neural processing. For those who want to remember them, the physician advises writing immediately upon waking — the window of recall closes quickly.
Extended wakefulness is more dangerous than most people appreciate. Seventeen consecutive hours without sleep impairs cognitive function to a level equivalent to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 percent. And with melatonin, the most effective approach is to start low: 0.5 mg mirrors what the body produces naturally and tends to be more effective than the larger doses that have become standard in the supplement industry.