Health guides are most valuable when they address real, evidence-based needs. A physician has distilled some of sleep science’s most important findings into five points — a practical guide that challenges assumptions and could genuinely improve the health of anyone who takes it seriously. The guide opens with a finding that changes the conversation immediately: women need more sleep than men.
The physician explains that women may require approximately 20 more minutes of sleep per night than men. This stems from the cognitive demands of multitasking — a mode of thinking that many women engage in extensively throughout the day. Simultaneously managing multiple responsibilities, tasks, and streams of thought puts significant pressure on the brain’s processing and organizational systems. During sleep, those systems need time to recover and restore, and more pressure means more recovery time needed.
The first point of the guide addresses sleep onset time — how long it should take to fall asleep. The physician describes 10 to 20 minutes as the normal range. Falling asleep significantly faster suggests that the body’s sleep debt has become large enough to crash the system quickly. Consistently taking much longer may indicate insomnia, a condition that affects not just the ability to fall asleep but also overall sleep quality and daytime functioning.
Point three covers dream memory — specifically, why we lose so much of it. About 95 percent of dreams are forgotten within minutes of waking, because dream content is not transferred into long-term memory during the sleep stages in which it’s generated. For those who want to capture their dreams, the physician’s advice is consistent: write them down immediately upon waking, before any other activity takes priority.
The guide’s final two points are directly actionable. Staying awake for 17 or more consecutive hours produces cognitive impairment comparable to mild intoxication — a comparison with serious implications for safety and performance. And with melatonin, the physician recommends starting at just 0.5 mg, a dose that aligns with the body’s natural production and is often more effective than the much higher doses that are widely marketed and sold.