Women are more tired than men but get less sympathy for it - that needs to change, writes Sophie Morris
They say that the dream is to sleep like a baby, but new evidence shows that we might be better off aiming to sleep like a man. Of late, I’ve been trying my best to emulate what Nasa scientists have found are typically male traits when it comes to fatigue, and boy am I feeling the benefits.
If you’re not a man but sleep next to one - as I do most nights, albeit in the biggest bed we could find - you might find some aspects of my experience familiar.
Though my husband will get up during the night with our daughter and is often up first on weekdays, at weekends and on holidays he can sleep in for hours, while my in-built alarm clock pops off at the same time every morning and my mind is flooded with that day’s bottomless to-do list.
Despite this, I have been moving closer and closer to the cosy side over the past few years. I’ve never understood people who save £15 on a cheap flight only to miss a night’s sleep for the privilege, and now try to plan my life around maximising my slumber.
I don’t enjoy letting people down but often have a long journey home from evening work events, so try to make it clear that I will be scuttling off before 10pm.
When I was arranging to go to the cinema with a friend who is an early riser last week, I was delighted when she suggested that we go to the 5.30pm screening. I know it sounds dull. It kind of is. But sleep has surpassed shame in my hierarchy of needs.
On New Year’s Eve, I worried that I wouldn’t make it until midnight and was thrilled on two counts when I did: firstly that my friends and the party were so much fun, and secondly that I hadn’t become a sleep-obsessed social pariah.
The Nasa study found that people of both sexes underestimate how exhausted women are, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. However, the fatigue concerns of the men involved were not only taken seriously, they were judged to be even more tired than they reported.
Of course. Isn’t this just how women’s pain is underestimated in all kinds of situations? The same team has done a study into women and pain and reached exactly the same conclusions: onlookers underestimated women’s pain and overestimated men’s.
One possible reason for misjudging women’s tiredness, according to researchers from the US space agency, is that women make an effort to show up when they are knackered, going the extra mile to be sociable even when they’re running on empty, and society is accustomed to this behaviour from us.
I stand by the researchers’ hunch that women underreport their own exhaustion in social situations because they are brought up as peoplepleasers: no one wants to stand around hearing how tired you are. It suggests that the other people are contributing to your weariness in some way.
Another reason, I would suggest, is widespread misogyny. Women are so “needy, moany, whingy and complainy” that we are not even taken seriously when we say we are ready for bed.
Why do we have the prerogative when it comes to sleep deprivation? And are we determined to keep it that way?
Perhaps it is connected to the lack of rest in early parenting, which used to be a solely female task and no doubt remains so across much of the world.
Or maybe it’s a learnt habit: just as we have to strive harder for the same recognition as men in nearly every area of life - such as those 54 days we work for free each year thanks to the gender pay gap - we have also acquired the skill of toughing it out on the sleep front, however exhausted we are.
Indeed, I would argue that most women sleep with one eye open. We never fully relax.
According to the US National Sleep Foundation, women experience far more sleep problems than men - from a greater rate of insomnia and daytime sleepiness to nighttime waking from hormonal issues, along with earlier waking times and night-time drowsiness because of different circadian rhythms.
Women are less likely to be referred for sleep studies, which fits this narrative of our sleep problems being underestimated - though apparently women do spend longer in bed at the weekend, unlike in my house.
I hope that things are changing.
My mum never went to bed before midnight, often later, and I have no idea why. She was always falling asleep, everywhere, but refused to give in just in case she missed some of the fun, which is invariably out of reach once you are at the dozing-off stage.
But I’m now emulating Generation Z’s clean-living ways and prioritising sleep.
If I had the energy, I would still be out in Soho until the early hours. There is more than a whisper in me that feels I should have the energy to go out every night. But at the age of 44, I am simply too tired to carry on pretending.
I made a sleep breakthrough over the Christmas holidays, and by the end of the two weeks I was managing mini lie-ins, which felt tremendous. I am so relieved to have stopped peoplepleasing, thrown off the weight of responsibility and dived headlong into my love affair with sleep - I have a few decades to make up for.