The gender sleep gap

We need to remember what it’s like to rest when we’re tired. It’s a fact women are more affected by insomnia than men. Having a female body means countless sleep saboteurs that have little to do with how virtuous we are about our sleep habits. Changes in hormones affect mood, body temperature, appetite, and levels of tension and pain our bodies: all these can sabotage our sleep. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, child-feeding and raising kids. Then add perimenopause and menopause. Every one of these skews our sleep by affecting our hormones, mental state, core body temperature, and in turn, our sleep.

These entirely natural processes don’t make it any easier for us to feel really rested all month. The sleep gap yawns wider. While we have to accept these variations as natural, books like Maisie Hill’s Period Power and Uma Tuli’s Yoni Shakti show us how to work with our female bodies.

As women, we’re both less likely to get the standard 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep and more likely to feel the pressure of yet another impossible body standard. Give us a body standard, and we’ll often feel we’re doing something wrong if we don’t achieve it. Like the performance-anxiety men can feel around having erectile problems, scrutinising and stressing about sleep is like a sleep-performance anxiety - it amps up our nervous systems, sabotaging a process that happens naturally when we are relaxed.

Before I started doing yoga, I knew that telling myself to relax simply didn’t work. I was too stressed and my thoughts were too anxious. I learnt that doing strong, slow yoga stretches that pulled the tension out of my body, with long, deep breaths, lengthening my exhalation really helped me to settle myself. I could feel the opening-up and settling-down in my body. My mind didn’t stop, but it did focus on the here-and-now, and on my body. Like a parent holds and gently rocks a baby to sleep, the stretches and breathing soothed me physically.

Your brain is hooked up to your body, with an elaborate and finely tuned system for the body to tell the brain to respond to cues about safety. When our bodies are tense, regardless of the source, it’s more likely we’ll have the brain chemistry related to stress, tension and alertness. Our bodies don’t open up when we’re not safe, so by taking the contraction out of your muscles, freeing up your breathing and making space, you’re signalling safety messages from body to brain: “It’s ok to release, relax, sleep.”

Bedtime routines: “the yoga stretches I use to help me sleep”