We know more about sleep and healthy sleep architecture than ever before.

We've got

Sleep trackers.

Sleep Apps.

Blue-light blocking glasses.

Magnesium.

Melatonin.

L-Theanine.

Sleep podcasts.

Sleep experts.

And yet women continue to report higher rates of insomnia, poorer sleep quality and greater fatigue than men.

If we have all this information about sleep, why do so many of us still feel completely exhausted?

For years, I'd wake in the middle of the night.

Usually somewhere between 1am and 3am.

I'd wake with my heart pounding, completely alert, despite feeling exhausted.

I'd lie there staring at the ceiling.

Wondering...

Was it stress?

Blood sugar?

Hormones?

My thyroid?

Perimenopause or menopause?

The irony was that I was doing many of the things we're told should improve sleep.

I exercised.

I ate well.

I meditated. (Over 520 days in a row thank you!)

I prioritised my health.

Yet I still felt exhausted, and I could not sleep through the night.

Despite the enormous amount of information available about sleep, much of what we know about human health was never truly representative of women anyway!

Women Were Never the Default

For much of modern medicine, women were overlooked in research.

Because researchers considered us too complicated.

Too many hormones.

Too many fluctuations.

Too much variability.

For decades, women were routinely excluded from clinical trials because hormonal cycles were viewed as a confounding factor that made research harder to interpret.

The result was that much of modern medicine was built on evidence derived primarily from male participants.

The default human was often assumed to be a 70kg male.

Which means much of what we've been told about sleep, metabolism, cardiovascular disease, exercise, fasting, medication and recovery has historically been extrapolated from studies on men.

Women aren't small men.

We have different hormonal rhythms, different reproductive stages, different stress responses and different physiological demands.

Only in recent decades have researchers begun studying women as a distinct population worthy of investigation in their own right.

Sleep recommendations have changed as a result.

How Much Sleep Do Women Actually Need?

The answer is nuanced, and of course has individual variability.

Current recommendations suggest that most adults require between seven and nine hours of sleep per night.

However, emerging research suggests that women may require slightly more sleep than men and may be more sensitive to the effects of poor sleep.

A large analysis published in 2025 found that the lowest risk of coronary heart disease occurred at approximately 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep for women, compared with around 7 to 8 hours for men.

We're not talking about women needing ten hours a night.

We're talking about subtle but meaningful differences.

Could you get an extra half an hour of sleep a night?

What may be even more interesting is that women often sleep slightly longer than men and yet consistently report poorer sleep quality, greater fatigue and more daytime sleepiness.

In other words, sleep quantity is only part of the story.

The real question may be:

Why are women sleeping, yet not feeling rested?

Sleep Through the Female Lifespan

One of the reasons women's sleep has been difficult to study is that it changes dramatically throughout life.

In Your 20s

For many women, sleep disruption is driven primarily by lifestyle.

Study.

Shift work.

Social schedules.

Career building.

Stress.

Hormonal fluctuations throughout the menstrual cycle can influence sleep quality, but many women still have a relatively robust ability to recover.

In Your 30s

For many women, sleep becomes less about biology and more about competing demands.

Pregnancy.

Babies.

Breastfeeding.

Careers.

Young children.

Mental load.

Research consistently shows that mothers experience significantly greater sleep disruption than fathers, particularly during the early years of parenting.

Many women spend years functioning on interrupted sleep while simultaneously maintaining careers, relationships and households.

Exhaustion becomes a normal state for them.

In Your 40s

This is where sleep issues often rear their head.

Many women begin experiencing sleep changes long before their final menstrual period.

This stage, known as perimenopause, can begin years earlier than when your periods actually cease.

Falling and fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone influence:

• Sleep quality

• Sleep maintenance

• Deep sleep

• Temperature regulation

• Mood

• Anxiety

• Blood sugar regulation

Many women report waking between 1am and 4am and being unable to get back to sleep.

I went through months and months of this pattern before i started to find some things that helped.

Research suggests that sleep complaints affect between 40% and 60% of menopausal women, while some studies report sleep disturbances in up to 80-90% of women during the menopausal transition.

That's the majority of women.

If you're waking at 2am wondering what's wrong with you, statistically speaking, you're not the outlier.

In Your 50s and Beyond

Sleep often becomes lighter and more fragmented.

Deep sleep tends to decline.

Sleep apnoea becomes more common.

Many women find themselves spending enough time in bed but waking feeling unrefreshed.

This is one reason why simply telling women to "get eight hours" often misses the mark.

The quality of sleep matters just as much as the quantity.

The Mental Load That Goes Unacknowledged.

There is another factor that sleep science is only beginning to fully appreciate.

Women aren't simply navigating hormonal changes.

Many women are carrying an extraordinary amount of responsibility.

Work.

Children.

Partners.

Household management.

Ageing parents.

Appointments.

School communication.

Meal planning.

Emotional labour.

The invisible work of anticipating everyone's needs before they arise.

Researchers refer to this as cognitive household labour.

Most of us simply call it life.

Recent research has shown that unpaid domestic work and caregiving responsibilities are associated with psychological distress, anxiety, depression and sleep disturbances in women.

Studies have also found that women performing multiple caregiving roles experience poorer sleep quality and shorter sleep duration than women without those responsibilities.

What if many women aren't exhausted because they're doing sleep wrong?

What if they're exhausted because they're carrying an unsustainable load and they are actually just freaking tired!

What I've Learned From Tracking My Own Sleep

I've stopped assuming there is a single answer.

Because as soon as I would have one thing nailed and improve my sleep a ittle, then something else would happen and I'd be awake for all those early morning hour...again!

I manage my sleep with multiple approaches.

I wear a continuous glucose monitor to understand how blood sugar affects my sleep. - Shocker I was having lows under 4mmol/L just before I would wake up.

My body was producing a cortisol surge to protect my brain from the low blood sugar and the resulting hormonal cascade meant no sleep for HOURS!

I use bio-identical hormones after extensive Dutch Hormone Testing showed that i had VERY low levels of any beneficial hormones.

My oestrogen was almost non existent and the little I had went down all the inflammatory pathways rather than any health supporting ones.

I add essential oils to this ritual to get even more out of my products.

I've looked at thyroid health. Even though I don't show up in tests as being hypothryroid, the teeniest bit of Levothyroxine stopped those blood suagr crashes that nothing else touched.

I often take some ketone esters before bed to make sure my brain is feeling calm and fuelled overnight too.

I've looked at liver function because the liver works hard in hormone metabolism and overnight physiological repair.

Screens before bed matter.

I tried to tell myself that with blue blocking glasses it was ok - but it's not and thats annoying!

I really enjoyed a bit of social media in the evening, it felt relaxing, but that's not how it works on our still very primitive body.

I would still fall asleep, but would again often wake up in those early hours.

The science on blue light is well established.

But sometimes we don't need a study to tell us what's going on.

Sometimes we need to pay attention to what our body is telling us!

Research on Scent, Sleep and Brain Health

Most people know that lavender is used for relaxation and sleep quality.

But new research revealed something so exciting!.

Significant improvements in brain health.

In a 2023 study from researchers at the University of California Irvine, adults aged 60 to 85 were exposed to a natural essential oil combination through a diffuser for two hours each night while they slept.

After six months, the scent-enriched group demonstrated a remarkable 226% improvement on a cognitive memory test compared with the control group.

Brain imaging also showed improved integrity of a neural pathway associated with memory and cognition.

A simple overnight ritual of using essential oils in your diffuser produced measurable improvements in cognitive performance.

It highlighted something many of us have intuitively understood for years, I have rarely missed diffusing overnight in my bedroom for over a decade.

Our sense of smell has direct connections to areas of the brain involved in memory, emotion and learning.

Unlike many other sensory pathways, scent has an almost immediate relationship with the limbic system.

Maybe that's one reason that catching the smell of something familiar can instantly transport us back to another place even from decades ago.

Or it can help us feel calm within minutes.

Personally, essential oils remain one of my favourite tools for supporting sleep.

Lavender.

Roman chamomile.

Vetiver.

Cedarwood.

Frankincense.

At the moment I'm loving Cinnamon Bark and Lemon as I support my system to avoid catching whatever my son has been home sick for over a week with!

I first started using oils to help my daughter get to sleep 22 years ago and I've only fallen more and more in love with what they can do for us since.

Sleep Is More Than Biology

I don't believe sleep or lack there of is purely biological.

I think it's biological.

Emotional.

Mental.

Energetic.

Before bed I don't just prepare my body.

I prepare myself.

I clear the day.

I release energy around any interactions that are still running in the background.

I consciously let go of things that don't belong to me.

I bring my attention back to my own energy.

I do this clearing ritual every night before I meditate.

And mostly with this routine, I drift off to sleep and stay that way until morning.

So Why Are Women Still Exhausted?

I don't think that women need another sleep hack.

The answer is more complex than that.

Women's sleep is influenced by hormones.

By life stage.

By caregiving.

By mental load.

By blood sugar.

By stress.

By physiology.

By expectations.

By the invisible responsibilities many women carry every day.

The more researchers study women specifically, the clearer it becomes that many women weren't "doing it wrong".

The advice was not tailored enough for them.

Women need to be realistic about their sleep. It can't be that they just go and go and go until they collapse, I mean they can - but is that a good idea???

Maybe the question we need to ask is

"What would it take for us to finally feel rested?"

And no matter how "inconvenient" the answer might be, just do it.

Maybe it's a weekend away BY YOURSELF to just stop and sleep.

Please don't let yourself miss out on sleep for years and years, because no one wants you to end up as part of the warning statistic figures of how perilous it is to not get deep restful; sleep.

Sleep is not a luxury.

It is a biological requirement.

And maybe one of the most radical things a woman can do is stop treating her own exhaustion as normal.