Women do need more sleep than men so make sure you give them that extra hour in peace!

Scientific studies have shown what women have always known to be true. Women need more sleep than men and that’s just the way it is. Women’s brains are complex and wired differently to men which means women use their brains differently - think of multitasking - and therefore need to rest their brains differently!

So next time your partner asks you to please ‘let me get that extra twenty minutes of sleep’, get up and do the laundry or make her coffee. She really needs those extra twenty minutes to recover from the many things she’s used her brain for during the day. Women work, they take care of kids, they do the shopping, they think of the past and the present and the future, and yes, they multi-task in a way that men find very difficult.

Professor Jim Horne who conducted the studies at the Sleep ResearchCentre at Loughborough University has said that the function of sleep is for the brain to recover and rejuvenate. During sleep, the part of the brain that is responsible for thought, language and memory, disengages and goes to sleep. That is the cortex. The cortex needs to rest so that it can continue to be so sharp. The more you use your cortex in the day, the more it needs to recover.

You may say that men spend a fortune of time thinking and working and using their cortex too. Of course, they do. But generally, and of course, it does not apply to all men, men ONLY work, whereas women work while managing several other tasks at the same time.

The research was conducted on men and women equally and their work patterns, habits and sleep patterns were monitored carefully. The studies showed that women do use their brains more, and for longer, hence needing more sleep.