Yahoo Lifestyle Why do women wake up feeling worse than men? The science (and inequity) of sleep and motherhood
Your toddler climbs into bed with you again at 2:14 a.m. You’ve barely settled back into REM when your alarm goes off. And when you rate your mood in that sleep-tracking app? Meh, at best.
According to Sleep Cycle’s new global report, you’re not alone: women wake up feeling worse than men. But while the report uses phrases like “wake-up mood” and “sleep quality,” the subtext many moms read loud and clear is: Why am I waking up so cranky when I’ve done everything “right”?
Let’s dig into the data and the deeper reasons behind it.
lRelated: You’re not imagining it: Mothers are sleep deprived for the first 6 years of parenthood
The wake-up mood gap is real
Sleep Cycle’s 2025 “Sleep Around the World” report found that women report a 57.21% average wake-up mood—3.64 percentage points lower than men (60.85%). That might not seem dramatic, but when you’re dragging yourself into another full day of work, caregiving, and mental load with even less emotional gas in the tank, it matters.
Dr. Michael Gradisar, Ph.D. and Sleep Cycle’s Head of Sleep Science, offers one explanation: “Given this rating happens when people wake up, it’s likely due to some aspect of sleep that occurs closer to the end of their sleep. But then again, we cannot rule out that as women wake up and perform their rating, that they’re not reflecting back on their night and recalling something bad that happened.”
In other words, we might already be waking up emotionally tallying how little sleep we actually got—and why.
Why are women waking up so tired?
It’s not just perception. The Sleep Cycle data shows that women actually go to bed earlier, wake up later, and report higher sleep quality than men. And yet? We feel worse.
Why? Gradisar points to key differences:
Night waking: “Women tend to report more than men that they wake during the night,” he says. “One distinguishing factor could be that women’s body temperature fluctuates across their 28-day menstrual cycle… But there’s other unique factors… including being the primary caregiver for children who wake during the night, as well as a greater tendency to worry when awake in bed.”
Caregiver default: “More often than not it’s the moms that are the ones who take care of the kids at night,” Gradisar says. “It’s so common that we can guess which side of the bed a child is likely to approach when they go to their parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night.”
Translation: Women are not sleeping through the night because the job of being a mom never clocks out.
Related: Why moms need to prioritize sleep—and how to make it happen
The sleep cost of motherhood across life stages
From menstruation to postpartum to menopause, women’s sleep is uniquely vulnerable. “The third trimester is one where sleep problems can seriously increase as the expectant mum feels more uncomfortable,” says Gradisar. “And when the baby is born… the already sleep-deprived mom is about to engage in a period of further sleeplessness.”
Even later in life, sleep continues to be disrupted. During menopause, Gradisar explains, “there can be alterations in thermoregulation that affect sleep, as well as an increase in snoring.” Many women turn to alcohol to try to fix it—“but it just alters the underlying sleep quality… making the situation that bit more worse.”
The report also notes that women report fewer alcohol-related sleep disruptions than men, suggesting increased awareness around its impact on rest.
The new Science of Sleep video course from Sleep Cycle dives deeper into menopause and sleep. Other episodes already live explore parent, teen, and young adult sleep. We spend ⅓ of our life sleeping, why not learn about how to do it more effectively as moms?
Related: Here’s how to tell if you’re in perimenopause
The bigger picture: It’s not just the sleep, it’s the system
When we ask why women wake up cranky, the data leads us to a harder truth: it’s not just about the hours slept. It’s about the unequal conditions under which we sleep. Women are still the ones getting up with the baby, worrying in bed, carrying the mental load.
And we’re not waking up cranky—we’re waking up exhausted by a culture that still expects moms to be society’s “shock absorbers,” as Motherly’s reporting has long documented.
We deserve better than a morning mood gap. We deserve systems that let us rest.
More to explore:
Let’s not just track our sleep—let’s change the world moms are waking up in.
