According to a recent study
conducted by Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre in
England, women need to sleep somewhere around 20 minutes more than men, Woman’s
Day reports. The study followed 210 middle-aged men and women.
"Women's brains are wired
differently ... so their sleep need will be slightly greater," Professor
Jim Horne, the former director of the research centre, said. 'Women tend
to multitask — they do lots at once and are flexible — and so they use
more of their actual brain than men do."
The study also found that
women are more likely to be depressed, angry or hostile due to a lack of
sleep.
"For women, poor sleep is
strongly associated with high levels of psychological distress and greater
feelings of hostility, depression and anger," Horne said, according
to the New York Post. "In contrast, these feelings were not associated
with the same degree of sleep disruption in men."
Horne debunked the myth that
women's tendency to sleep longer is not due to any fault of their own. Instead,
the extended sleep may be due to the fact that women experience a slower-wave sleep,
"and a sign of their having greater brain recovery during sleep, which in
turn indicates that women tend to work their cerebral cortices harder than does
the age-related man, Horne said in an email to Entrepreneur.
Several
studies corroborate the claim: Duke University scientists found that
women can face serious health consequences if they miss out on sleep.