Torbjörn Åkerstedt, professor emeritus at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, has explored the contrasting perceptions of sleep quality between men and women. His research involved 238 men and 238 women in Sweden, aged 29 to 85, who recorded their sleep for one night using polysomnography—a method that assesses brain activity, breathing, and movements during sleep. The participants then rated their perceived sleep quality the following morning.
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Published in the journal Sleep Advances, the findings indicate that women generally rated their sleep quality as poorer than men, despite objective measures showing that women had better sleep overall. Women experienced fewer awakenings per hour, enjoyed longer total sleep times, demonstrated higher sleep efficiency, and had more deep sleep than their male counterparts.
The study highlighted a disparity in how men and women perceive their awakenings at night. Women were found to estimate their awakenings accurately, while men tended to underestimate them. Generally, men rated their sleep positively even after short awakenings, while women reported lower sleep quality regardless of the duration of their awakenings.
According to Åkerstedt, when men with minimal awakenings were excluded from the analysis, the perceived difference in sleep quality between genders vanished. He notes, "Our results suggest that men’s more positive view of their sleep may be partly due to them not perceiving or remembering short awakenings during the night as well as women do," though the reason for this discrepancy remains unclear.
The study also noted that age exacerbates the difference in sleep patterns. Older men generally experienced less deep sleep and more frequent awakenings, while women’s objective sleep quality declined at a slower rate. Nevertheless, women persisted in reporting poorer sleep quality than men.
It is important to mention that the study is limited by its single-night measurement, which may not accurately represent long-term sleep behaviors. The research was a collaboration with Stockholm University and Uppsala University and was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, and the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation. The researchers declared no conflicts of interest.
The study, titled "Gender differences in objective and self-reported sleep," was authored by Torbjörn Åkerstedt, Johanna Schwarz, Eva Lindberg, and Jenny Theorell-Haglöw, and published online on April 27, 2026.