Nobody tells you everything about sleep. You learn the basics — seven to eight hours, consistent schedule, dark room — but the finer details, the ones that really shape your health, often go unshared. A physician is changing that with five things most people have never been told, beginning with a finding that’s both surprising and important: women need more sleep than men.
The physician explains that women may require around 20 more minutes of sleep per night than men. The reason involves cognitive load — specifically, the demands of multitasking. Many women spend their days simultaneously managing multiple responsibilities, thought streams, and tasks. This intensive use of the brain’s executive systems leaves more processing and recovery work to be done overnight. Sleep is when that work happens, and more work means more time needed.
Sleep onset is one of the first things nobody tells you about. The normal, healthy range for falling asleep is 10 to 20 minutes. If it happens much faster on a regular basis, your body may have reached a point of serious sleep deprivation. If it consistently takes 30 or more minutes, insomnia may be at play — a condition that affects millions of people and significantly impacts both sleep quality and daytime functioning.
Dream loss is another thing nobody typically explains. About 95 percent of dream content is forgotten within minutes of waking up, because the sleep stages where dreams occur don’t effectively encode those experiences into long-term memory. If you want to remember your dreams, the only reliable method is to write them down the moment you open your eyes, before the fragile memory traces fade completely.
Two final insights complete the list. Seventeen hours of continuous wakefulness produces cognitive impairment comparable to 0.05 percent blood alcohol concentration — meaningful enough to affect safe driving and complex decision-making. And with melatonin supplements, starting at just 0.5 mg — an amount that most closely mirrors the body’s natural production — tends to produce better results than the higher doses that most stores stock as standard options.