If You’re a Woman With Insomnia, Doing This One Thing Can Change Everything

My husband and I have fallen into a pattern that makes him hate me on weekend mornings. The patterns is that I get up before the sun, ready and excited to start my day while he pulls the blankets up over his head and pretend snore sleeps while I urge him to get up with me.

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Those who know me would probably be surprised to find out that I can't sleep past 5:00 a.m., (even on my days off) considering how exhausted I am all of the time. I have a pretty wonky work schedule plus a million and one other things that take place in my every day and I struggle to get even just four hours of sleep in a night.

So why do I bounce out of bed on the weekends like I'm a kid who has just woken up on Christmas Day, especially when I don't have to - when I can actually sleep in? Well, researchers out of Bringham and Women’s Hospital (some of the most brilliant medical minds in the world- they cured my dad of his rare cancer) discovered that women have an internal clock and that it runs, on average, six minutes faster than the internal clock of men.

I know that six minutes doesn’t sound like much of a time difference, but it’s actually a huge difference. Because the internal clock of a woman runs faster than that of a man, we tend to be more alert in the morning, have trouble staying awake when we’re super tired, and suffer from more insomnia.

If you could see me, you would see me waving my hand frantically as if shouting out, "Hi, it's me and I know all about the curse of insomnia."

If you find yourself laying in bed night after night begging for sleep to come, the researchers at Bingham and Women’s Hospital say that you need to make sure your bedroom is dark. Like pitch black.

Another little “who knew?” nugget is that our internal clocks need darkness earlier and especially in the warmer months when the sun us up longer and darkness doesn’t come until much later into the evening, we need to make sure that we block all the light that we can and researchers say it will help us fall asleep easier.