Sleep does far more than simply restore energy. It consolidates memories, regulates hormones, supports immune function, and processes the emotional and cognitive events of the day. A physician recently offered a five-point reality check on what sleep really does — and at the top of the list is a biological reality that many people haven’t encountered: women need more sleep than men.
The physician explains that women may require approximately 20 more minutes of sleep per night. The reason is rooted in the cognitive demands of daily life. Women, on average, tend to engage in more multitasking — simultaneously managing multiple responsibilities and streams of thought. This cognitively intensive mode of operation demands more from the brain’s processing systems, which then need more time during sleep to recover, organize, and restore. Sleep scales with cognitive demand, and for many women, that demand is consistently higher.
The time it takes to fall asleep provides important clues about sleep health. The physician identifies 10 to 20 minutes as the normal, healthy range. Consistently falling asleep faster may indicate that the body is operating with significant accumulated sleep debt. Consistently taking much longer may point to insomnia — one of the most common but underdiagnosed sleep conditions, which affects both the ability to fall asleep and the quality of sleep throughout the night.
Dreams, despite how vivid and emotionally significant they can feel, are almost entirely forgotten by the time we’re fully awake. About 95 percent of dream content disappears within minutes of waking, because dreams occur in sleep phases that don’t effectively encode content into long-term memory. Writing down dreams immediately upon waking — before conversation, before screens, before getting out of bed — remains the most effective way to preserve them.
Extended wakefulness is genuinely impairing: 17 hours without sleep brings cognitive performance down to a level comparable to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 percent. And with melatonin, the physician firmly recommends starting low — around 0.5 mg — as this dose most closely mirrors what the body produces naturally and tends to support better sleep outcomes than the higher doses commonly available.