Health guides that ignore sleep are incomplete, because sleep influences nearly every system in the body. A physician has contributed five expert insights that deserve a place in any comprehensive approach to health — beginning with the finding that women need more sleep than men, a fact backed by research and explained by the cognitive demands of daily life.
The physician estimates the difference at approximately 20 minutes of additional sleep per night for women. The driving factor is multitasking — the cognitively intensive process of simultaneously managing multiple tasks, responsibilities, and information streams. The more the brain engages in this kind of processing during the day, the more recovery work it needs to do during sleep. For many women, that cognitive demand is consistently high, resulting in a consistently higher sleep need.
Sleep onset time is an important but overlooked metric. The physician identifies 10 to 20 minutes as the normal, healthy window for falling asleep. If you regularly fall asleep much faster, it could mean your body is running on a significant sleep deficit — crashing rather than easing into rest. If you consistently take much longer, it may be worth exploring whether insomnia or stress-related factors are disrupting your ability to fall asleep.
Dreams are lost at a remarkably consistent rate. About 95 percent of dream content is forgotten within minutes of waking because it doesn’t get encoded into long-term memory. This is a structural aspect of how the brain operates during sleep, not a personal failing. If you want to remember your dreams, keep a journal beside your bed and write down whatever you can recall the moment you wake up.
Two final insights round out the physician’s list. Seventeen hours of continuous wakefulness impairs the brain comparably to mild intoxication, with a 0.05 blood alcohol equivalent — significant enough to affect driving, judgment, and workplace performance. And for melatonin users, starting with just 0.5 mg is the physician’s recommendation: this dose mirrors the body’s own natural production and often proves more effective than the high doses marketed as standard.
