Who’d be a woman? Not only do we have the glass ceiling, gender inequality and various other things to deal with – we’re also more likely to sleep more poorly than men.
According to new research from sleep posture experts Levitex, eight in 10 women suffer from poor quality or interrupted sleep – and half of us suffer from fatigue, resulting in more stress, anxiety and poorer brain function than men.
It’s an issue that’s clearly affecting a lot of us, and yet it’s rarely talked about.
“Women are more likely to have insomnia than men,” says physiotherapist Louise Rogerson. “Women are more likely to have an anxiety disorder which affects sleep quality and women are more likely to rate their sleep as poor than men.”
Insomnia is a complex beast, and while for most people it conjures to mind the image of lying awake at night, unable to nod off, that’s not exactly true. According to Rogerson, many women have no trouble getting to sleep.
“A lot of women will report that actually they go to sleep quite quickly because they’re so exhausted,” she says. “But then they wake… and when they’re awake, they then struggle to get back to sleep.”
Why? A lot of the issue is to do with mental health and the mental workload. “I think that the reality for women is that we do tend to get up in the night, we’ve got our caring duties, we’ve more likely to have anxiety, and we will just keep going and going and going,” says Rogerson.
Added to that, the menopause and their menstrual cycles both have a massive impact on sleep quality – and the result can be, as she puts it, “a recipe for disaster.”
That resulting disruption, she says, can actually be more damaging for our quality of sleep than insomnia.
“[We have] an obsession with how many hours you get. We don’t talk enough about the quality of those hours that you get,” she says. “If you’re up like every couple of hours through the night, you’re really disrupting your natural sleep rhythms and therefore you are going to have much poorer sleep quality and more likely to wake feeling tired.”
At a time when the world seems ever busier, it can feel ever harder to find the headspace and time to devote to sleeping well. We spoke to Rogerson and insomnia specialist Kathryn Pinkham on their tips for doing just that.
Figuring what how we best sleep is something that shouldn’t be done five minutes before bedtime.
“I think it’s really important for women to just take a bit of time and have a look and say right, look at where you are, look at what the covers are, make sure you’ve got the stuff that you need for a decent night sleep and prep a little bit,” says Rogerson.
Make sure the room is cool, make sure there’s a dedicated ‘lights off’ time if possible, and make sure that the pillows and mattress are ones that are comfortable.
“Have different pillows for your reading and you can take those off and have your sleep pillow, that’s putting you in the right posture for sleep,” says Rogerson. “A pillow that’s perfect for propping you up to read is not the same pillow that’s going to support your head in a good position overnight.”
Piglet in Bed
Whether it’s winter or summer, one helpful way to modulate body temperature is by including a lot of layers in your bedding.
“Keep your bedroom as cold as you can and get yourself warmer with your bedding,” says Rogerson. “Include lots of layers so that you can have a lighter sheet if you need it. And this is good for women anyway as they go through their cycle.” Cool the room down for an hour before sleep – and as we edge into summer, replace blankets with layers of sheets.
It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best things we can do in terms of tackling insomnia is getting out of bed earlier.
“When someone’s struggling to sleep well, we automatically tend to spend too long in bed because we go to bed a bit earlier, we get up a bit later because we’re trying to increase the opportunity to get more sleep,” says Kathryn Pinkham, who runs The Insomnia Clinic.
“In order to sleep well, we have to have a really strong sleep drive and that drive is built up by time out of bed. So if we were to set our alarms an hour earlier and if we go to bed an hour later, for example, what will happen is that we’ve been out of bed for longer, our natural appetite for sleep is going to be stronger.”
If we’re in bed for nine hours, but only asleep for five, that’s a lot of time awake in bed, and “your body no longer knows what to do… so instead push your sleep back, wake up earlier.”
Don’t look at the clock – or your phone
Photo by Greg Pappas on Unsplash
One key piece of advice from Pinkham is to avoid looking at your watch during those sleepless hours.
“Your body is a clock,” she says. “So if I was waking up at 2:00 a.m. for a week, and I set my alarm, I could probably stop setting my alarm next week and I’d wake up at 2:00. My body would just learn what to do.”
Unfortunately, the body can also learn to do this during bouts of insomnia. To avoid the problem, put the clock away.
Plus, get rid of that phone in the bedroom. Not only does it emit blue light, which can suppress the production of melatonin (a hormone that regulates sleep-wake cycles), but it’s a distraction that sucks up time when you should be sleeping. Instead, try investing in a radio or an alarm clock in the bedroom instead: a good place to start looking would be Roberts, a British company whose rather lovely radios include alarms, Bluetooth connectivity and (depending on your preference) have models that tell the time too.
Tackle anxiety during the day
We’ve all been there: awake, in the middle of the night, with a hundred thoughts going through our heads. For Pinkham, the answer lies during the waking hours.
“Because we’re busy all the time… most people don’t make time to process things,” she says. “During the daytime, make time to sit and write down everything that’s on your mind. That in itself is really therapeutic. And we can get into the habit of seeing, what can we control? What is out of our control? What’s a real problem?”
All of those techniques mean that when you wake in the middle of the night, you “it becomes a lot easier to say I have dealt with this; I’ve mad a plan, or I’ve accepted that I can’t do anything about this.”