Ladies, are not you in the morning? Thanks to this article, you will be able to remain under the duvet without scruple, concrete arguments in support. According to many studies, women need more sleep than men. Marc Rey, head of the Center for Sleep and Vigilance at the Timone Hospital in Marseille, explains why.
You are rarely fresh and available early in the morning? It’s nature! For a long time, studies have shown that women need more sleep than men. For example, according to a recent Ipsos survey of 6,000 people for the Adova Foundation, when the average respondent reported having slept poorly after a night of fewer than 7 hours, women reported being in this situation below 7:30 am of sleep.
To understand the sources of this “inequality”, we asked our questions to Dr. Marc Rey, head of the Sleep and Vigilance Center at the Timone Hospital in Marseille.
Hormones, these disruptive elements of sleep
“There are indeed more fat sleepers than heavy sleepers and explanations are essentially hormonal,” he says. “During the menstrual cycle, a woman experiences a variation in estrogen and progesterone levels that causes periods of fatigue, lack of sleep or fragmented sleep.” She needs to sleep more to feel rested.
In a woman’s life, the perinatal period is also a time when lack of sleep is sorely felt. “In the first three months of pregnancy, progesterone levels increase rapidly,” explains Rey, “with sedative effects that lead to a greater need for sleep, the same in the last three months, progesterone , more or less effectively, insomnia related to the discomfort of the heaviness of the belly, the baby who moves … “
Finally, menopause, punctuated by hot flashes and accompanied by a drop in estrogen levels, can also increase fatigue.
The birth of a child, a period when lack of sleep is sorely felt
During the first months of the child’s life, and especially when breastfeeding, the young mother again experiences a disturbed sleep that gives rise to a need to sleep longer. According to a study by the British University of Warwick conducted on more than 2500 women and nearly 2200 men, a woman loses an average of 40 minutes of sleep per night in the year following the arrival of her baby. The first three months, the loss of sleep can even go up to 1 hour per night. For fathers, this lack would only culminate at 13 minutes per night.
The mental charge, the other explanation
Finally, if the era tends to blur inequalities between men and women, as well as sexist stereotypes, many women still find themselves in charge of organizing the home. “My husband helps me a lot at home in the daily chores, but you always have to point him out: prepare the shopping list, the baby’s business, tell him what to eat and how it’s cooked, we told Anne-Cecile a few months ago, following a call for testimony on Facebook.
But for the head of the Sleep and Vigilance Center at the Timone Hospital, “it is clear that this mental burden increases the need for sleep, simply because it requires a reorganization and digestion nocturnal information of the day”.
