It’s not hard to imagine how noise, the weather, an unsettled child or a bad day at work could influence how you sleep.
But what about where you live, your ethnicity, your education, or your income?
Would a factory shift worker from a non-English speaking background who lives in a rough part of town be more likely to have poor sleep than a professional from a well-to-do suburb earning a stable income?
Not withstanding the sleep-disrupting pressures many professionals face — the answer is very possibly yes.
There’s likely a complex web of interactions at play, according to Dorothy Bruck, emeritus professor of psychology at Victoria University and a sleep psychologist with the Sleep Health Foundation.
“Certainly gender, is a social determinant,” Dr Hillman said.
Dr Hillman says men are more likely to experience issues such as sleep apnoea and snoring, but women are more likely to experience disrupted sleep and insomnia in particular.
He says one of the reasons for this is that women are more prone to experiencing depression, which can interfere with quality of sleep.
But other factors behind the difference between the genders are less clear.
“It could be some sort of an adaptive response or a particular attentiveness to environmental disturbances overnight, such as when a baby stirs,” Dr Hillman said.
“Those sorts of provocations can take different forms … but this tendency for arousal from sleep is a little bit more developed in women than in men, however there are overlaps between the genders.”
Having children can change sleep differences between men and women too.
Australian research published this year found that women without children sleep on average more than men, but once they become mothers the pattern reverses, with the gap between the genders for average weekly sleeping hours increasing with each subsequent child.
Anxiety and sleep
When unravelling the research, one of the challenges is working out the extent to which poor quality of sleep has preceded other health conditions. It’s known that depression can impair sleep for instance, but poor sleep can also increase your risk of depression.
From 2000 until 2009 Dr Bruck and a team of researchers led by Melinda Jackson, now a senior research fellow at RMIT University, followed a group of nearly 10,000 young women to explore the association between sleep difficulties and depression and anxiety.
Their study found that the women who reported sleep difficulties at the beginning of the research had four to five times the risk of reporting depression nine years later at the conclusion of the research than those who were good sleepers.
Dr Bruck has recently finished working on a new study with researchers at Victoria University looking at quality of sleep among Australia’s South Sudanese community. She says while women as a group tend to report greater amounts of sleep disturbance than men, in the case of the South Sudanese the data is reversed and it is men who report poor quality sleep at higher rates.
