Women need two more hours of sleep than men every night, claims health influencer – but is he right?

It is a bold and somewhat surprising claim.

According to social media health guru and author Dr Patrick Flynn, a self-proclaimed hormone expert, women need at one to two hours of extra sleep per night.

In a recent post shared with his 324,000 Instagram followers, Dr Flynn claimed women need ‘8-10 hours of sleep’, while men only need ‘7-8 hours’. 

He suggested that this was due to differences in hormonal fluctuations between men and women, which means lack of sleep ’causes more stress on a woman’s body than a man’s body’.

Dr Patrick Flynn, who calls himself ‘the hormone whisperer’, says women sometimes need more than two hours extra sleep per night, to avoid ‘extra stress’ on their body.

 However, guidance from the American Association of Sleep Medicine says different; recommending at least seven hours per night for all ‘adults aged 18 to 60 years’. 

So what’s the truth?

The answer, according to science, is that women likely do need more sleep than men – but not as much as Dr Flynn suggests.

Researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed minutes of sleep collected from nationally representative samples of working-age adults in the American Time Use Surveys of 2003 to 2007.

They found that overall, women slept more than men – by just over 11 minutes.

‘Much of the gap is explained by work and family responsibilities,’ the researchers said.

Researchers have observed that women dedicate more time to unpaid labor and family caregiving.

Women are more likely than men to wake up to look after members of the family, which can disrupt their sleep and lead them to need more.

Meanwhile, a study from Loughborough University compared a group of 210 middle-aged men and women.

The research found that on average, women require at least 20 minutes more sleep than men.

Experts suggest that men likely do need slightly more sleep than men, mostly due to the complex tasks they often juggle all in one go

The study suggested that women need extra sleep because their brains work harder due to the fact that they multi-task.

‘One of the major functions of sleep is to allow the brain to recover and repair itself,’ said Professor Jim Horne, the director of the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University.

‘During deep sleep, the cortex — the part of the brain responsible for thought memory, language and so on — disengages from the senses and goes into recovery mode.

‘The more of your brain you use during the day, the more of it that needs to recover and, consequently, the more sleep you need.’

He added: ‘Women tend to multitask — they do lots at once and are flexible — and so they use more of their actual brain than men do. Because of that, their sleep need is greater. 

‘A man who has a complex job that involves a lot of decision-making and lateral thinking may also need more sleep than the average male — though probably still not as much as a woman.’

Professor Horne said: ‘This is because women’s brains are wired differently from men’s and are more complex, so their sleep need will be slightly greater. The average is 20 minutes more, but some women may need slightly more or less than this.’

There is also a hormonal element to the discrepency. 

Australian doctor Dr Carmel Harrington said that increasing levels of the sex hormone progesterone which happens in the final two weeks of a women’s monthly cycle have a sedative effect that means women require more sleep.

Around this time, women should be sleeping for at least half an hour longer than normal, she said.

‘As we get closer to the end of our cycle, a lot of us suffer from PMT (premenstrual tension), feeling irritable, grumpy or emotional,’ she said. ‘And those are also the hallmarks of sleep deprivation.’

Another study from 2016 by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany compared 160 adults of both sexes and found that women need to sleep longer to restore brain power.