Sleep is much more vital to our body than we think, because it's not just a moment of daily break. Without sleep many of our abilities are diminished. Needs differ according to several criteria such as the age and gender of the person. Moreover, the latest research shows that women need more sleep than men, find out why!
During sleep, many things happen in our body, some organs are at rest, some compounds are made and all that is essential to recover the energy needed to better cope with all our daily activities.
Why do women need more sleep?
Women need more sleep than men because of their "complex" brain, according to research.
Scientists have found that about 20 extra minutes of sleep are needed for women compared to men. According to them, this was due to the fact that the female brain works harder during the day.
The study was conducted on a sample of 210 men and women of middle age.
Jim Horne, the study's author, and former director of Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University, said that one of the main functions of sleep is to allow the brain to recover and repair itself. During deep sleep, the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for the memory of thought, language, etc. gets off the senses and goes into recovery mode.
Professor Horne stated that the amount of sleep that is needed varies with the complexity and intensity of brain activity during the day.
The study found that the more you use your brain during the day, the more you need to recover and, therefore, the longer you sleep. Women tend to do multiple tasks, do a lot of things at the same time, and are flexible, so they use their brains more than men. Because of this, their need for sleep is greater. The average is 20 minutes longer, but some women may need a little more or less than that.
However, research has also shown that men who have complex jobs that involve a lot of "decision-making and lateral thinking" are also likely to need more sleep than others.
The study also found that poor sleep in women was linked to a number of side effects. Increased levels of psychological distress and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger are found in women who have slept poorly, but not in men.
The biological and psychological differences between the two genders do not stop just at sleep but with several aspects of which we quote by way of example:
The heart of the woman beats faster than that of the man
The heart of a woman is about two-thirds that of a man, weighing an average of 250g, against 300g in men, but it beats a little faster to make up for its lack of size.
Thus, while the heart of a healthy adult man averages 70 to 72 beats per minute, in a woman, it is 78 to 82.
In addition to the difference in size, the heart of women beats faster because there is greater activity in their sympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that accelerates the heart rate in times of stress or danger, explains Martin Cowie, professor of cardiology at Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
Women have 7 million more smell cells than men
When a woman smells the smell of laundry from a distance, it's not because she's a maniac, it's because she has a sense of smell much more developed than the man.
Scientists have found that women have 40% more extra cells in the olfactory bulb, an area of the brain that controls our sense of smell.
This is considered an aspect of evolution where increased ability of smell has helped women to choose partners for reproductive purposes, by detecting subtle changes in men's testosterone levels.
In 2014, researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil studied the brains of deceased adults and discovered that men had 9.2 million cells in the olfactory bulb, but women had 16.2 million.