Disturbed sleep is a common problem — and one that has many serious consequences beyond feeling tired the next day. Research has linked insomnia and poor sleep to early mortality and diseases including diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Women often report experiencing disturbed sleep more frequently than men. They also constitute the majority of patients in sleep clinics. Yet strangely, some studies show worse objective sleep quality in men – a bit of a paradox.

To understand what might explain the paradox, my colleagues and I conducted a study that directly compared sleep quality ratings and objective sleep measures between men and women.

We found that women complained more of sleep problems – but slept objectively much better than men. We think this paradox can probably be explained by men overestimating their sleep quality as they’re less able to perceive how often they wake up at night.

A total of 238 randomly selected women participated in the study, plus 238 men who were matched on age and BMI with the women to ensure similar participants were compared against each other.

Sleep was recorded in each participant’s home using a recorder that measured brain waves (electroencephalography – EEG), muscle tension (electromyography - EMG) and eye movements (electrooculography - EOG). These devices tracked what stage of sleep a participant was in and for how long, how much time they spent awake and how quickly they fell........

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