Nearly 3 in 10 women admit to taking some form of sleep medication at least a few nights a week, according to a 2007 study by the National Sleep Foundation.
In the study, called “Women and Sleep," 80 percent of women reported being too stressed or worried to fall asleep, and 84 percent of new mothers reported insomnia, according to the New York Times.
Insomnia also seems to affect women much more than men. Dr. Nancy Collop, director of the Emory Sleep Center in Atlanta, said three out of four insomnia patients at the clinic are women, the New York Times reports. She points to the rising use of technology late at night as part of the culprit.
“There’s always the worry another e-mail has come in,” she said, as reported by the New York Times. “Just the light from the electronic book or the iPad screen is stimulating.”
But older women are more likely to actually take medication than new mothers, according to IMS Health, a health care consulting firm in Danbury, Conn. It states that use of prescription sleep aids among women peaks from 40 to 59.
Last year, the firm said, 15,473,000 American women between those ages got a prescription (overwhelmingly for Zolpidem, the generic form of Ambien) to help them sleep, nearly twice the number of men in that age group, the New York Times reports.
