Do you get the sense that everyone around you has started tracking their sleep? Everywhere I go, someone is talking about the newest ‘thing’ that tells them whether or not they had a good night’s sleep.

The stats back it up too: Global wearable use for sleep tracking has jumped from 16% to 53% in just a year. We've basically turned bedtime into a stats game.

But for all the talk of optimising sleep, having good sleep hygiene, and turning off phones, there’s one thing that doesn’t get much airtime: the science of why we sleep differently.

In today’s newsletter, we’re going to unpack why men and women aren’t actually sleeping the same way, and what the research tells us about these differences. Let’s go!

^{A note on this edition: Macquarie University is the sponsor of today’s newsletter, and also provided research and insights for today's newsletter but had no editorial input on what we've written here.}

The science of why men and women sleep differently starts at the very beginning: puberty. That's the point where hormones start behaving differently depending on which body they're in, and sleep patterns begin splitting off from there.

It's why every heterosexual couple has one person who falls asleep mid-sentence and another who's still awake 20 minutes later, mildly annoyed about it.

For women, sleep never really settles. It keeps shifting with every major hormonal stage that follows: a woman's period, pregnancy, menopause, all of it.

Oestrogen and progesterone drop off every month during a woman's period, which throws off sleep quality without many women realising the two are connected. Pregnancy adds hypersomnia, insomnia, sometimes gestational sleep apnoea, often in the same nine months. And menopause brings a steep drop in oestrogen that leaves up to 70% of women dealing with night sweats and hot flushes wrecking their sleep.

Men go through hormonal changes too, but according to Dr Aurore Perrault, a neuroscientist in sleep medicine at Macquarie University's Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, the hourly swings in testosterone just don't hit sleep as hard.

“One interesting thing with men’s hormones versus women’s hormones is the timing,” Dr Perrault said. “Women go through hormonal fluctuations across the months. But with men, the testosterone changes within the day. Within the day, they will have a peak of testosterone in the morning and the lowest before going to bed.”

According to Dr Perrault, the results of these different changes mean that women actually need more sleep than men.

On average, men need seven to eight hours of sleep per night. This is compared to women, who need about seven and a half hours to eight and a half hours of sleep.

So, only half an hour in it.

But my chat with Dr Perrault revealed something even more interesting to me.

I asked her why women seem to need to get up in the middle of the night to pee more than men. The answer? This isn’t because of any biological or physical difference - it’s because of the mental load.

“It's not just hormones,” Dr Perrault said. “Obviously, there's a link.  But there's also an indirect link that is also more psychosocial. Society, your life, your mental health – all this is also linked to sleep. I don't think women are doomed to have insomnia across their whole life, but they are more vulnerable at different points in their life.”

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