Are you a woman who wakes up wishing she hadn’t? Do you bury your face in your pillow and sigh over the loss of dreamland, bracing yourself to face the day?
If so, apparently you’re not alone. A recent international study found women tend to be grumpier in the morning than men, even after getting more sleep!
Why? Sleep experts suggest that women use more of their brains during the day because they tend to multi-task more, and thus they need more sleep to rejuvenate.
But they aren’t always getting it. Despite needing more sleep, working women and mothers of young children are among the most sleep deprived Americans.
After passing out from exhaustion and breaking her cheekbone, Arianna Huffington co-wrote blog in 2010 that challenged women to get more sleep, calling it “the next feminist issue.”
The blog suggested that women always try to squeeze too much into their busy days and end up sacrificing the rest they need, becoming “significantly more sleep-deprived than men…”
Quoting sleep expert Dr. Michael Breus: “[Women] have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they’ve just got to get that last thing done. And that’s when it starts to get bad.’”
The latest research is from alarm clock app Sleep Cycle, which studied one million users in 50 different countries for nine months. It found that women ages 16-55 got more sleep than men, but in most countries (with the exceptions of Colombia, Portugal and Ukraine) they self-reported worse morning moods.
Do all women wake up crankier than men? No. We all know there are early birds and night owls among us—and those proclivities don’t seem tied to gender.
It bears noting that studies find all sorts of things, and some findings stand the test of time while others don’t. (The latest diet fads, for example this journalist just tricked a bunch of people into thinking that chocolate helps with weight loss.) It’s hard to tell exactly how well a study represents reality without knowing all sorts of details about its methodology and whatnot.
But in this case, other research also suggests that women need more sleep than men and suffer more physically and mentally without it.
Duke University found a much closer link between lack of sleep and health ailments such as heart disease, stroke and depression among women than men.
Do all of these findings point to a straight-up biological difference between the genders, or are they more related to the amount of stress that women carry in daily life? Do women need more sleep just because they do or because they’re trying to do more during the day?
It’s hard to parse those nuances with any certainty. But what we do know for sure is that sleep deprivation is typically an avoidable evil. So if you’re a sleep-deprived woman (or someone who cares about a sleep-deprived woman), consider making sleep a priority. Get yourself a decent mattress and then get on it at a decent hour. You’ll be glad you did.
Sleep tight, Urbanites!