What Do Women Want? A Good Night's Sleep

Six in 10 U.S. women responding to a nationwide poll said they sleep poorly most nights. More than half of poll respondents reported feeling unhappy, sad, or depressed in the past month, and one-third said they felt hopeless about the future a lot or sometimes in the prior month.

Sleepy women said they often lacked time to exercise, spend time with family or friends, enjoy leisure activities such as watching television or reading, eat right, or cook a healthy meal. About 30 percent said they often were too weary or busy to have sex.

“American women struggle to 'do it all,'” said Kathryn Lee, Ph.D., a professor of family health care nursing at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing. Lee served on the task force overseeing the National Sleep Foundation's 2007 Sleep in America poll, which focused on women's sleep. Poll results were released in March.

Polltakers surveyed a randomly selected sample of 1,003 women aged 18 to 64 years living in the continental United States. The telephone interviews, which took about 25 minutes, were conducted between September 12, 2006, and October 28, 2006. The poll has a margin of error of 3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.

About 25 percent of respondents said they had been diagnosed with depression, and 16 percent said they had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Overall, about two-thirds of respondents said they had been told by a physician that they had at least one medical condition. Nearly 60 percent were either overweight or obese, slightly under the national average of 66 percent.

About 29 percent of respondents reported using a sleep aid at least a few nights a week. Some 12 percent reported using physician-prescribed antidepressants, and 8 percent used prescription hypnotics.

Women who used a prescription medication to aid sleep were more apt than nonusers to report having driven drowsy at least once a month. They also consumed nearly four cups or cans of caffeinated beverages per day, about twice as much as those not using such medication.

Respondents overall averaged just under 7.5 hours in bed on workdays, and nearly an hour longer on days off. (Pollsters asked about “time in bed” rather than the more subjective “amount of sleep.”)

About 17 percent of respondents—mainly married women aged 35-44 with full-time jobs and children under age 18 living at home—reported averaging less than six hours in bed per night. Part-time working mothers (16 percent of respondents) reported getting the most sleep of any demographic group: half said they averaged eight or more hours in bed per night.

“Unfortunately, many women cannot afford to work only part time,” Lee said. “The full-time workers need encouragement to ask for help with meal preparation, car-pooling, child care, and other activities. They're deluding themselves if they think they can take good care of their families on too little sleep.”

In an ideal world, she said, employers would offer flexible work hours, on-site child care, exercise facilities, transportation services, and even the option to purchase take-home family meals. Spouses or partners, if present, would share household responsibilities equitably.

But the bottom line, she said, is that “women need to make sleep a priority for themselves and set a healthy example for their family.”

More details on the National Sleep Foundation poll are posted at<www.sleepfoundation.org/2007poll>.▪