The Essential Guide to Women’s Sleep Supporting Healthy Sleep Practices for Wellbeing and Performance
Calling all health and exercise practitioners! Clinical and non-clinical. Does sleep interest you? Does sleep elude you? Are your patients or clients struggling with sleep? If so, then this is the book for you.
Human sleep is fundamental to life. It is a universal experience in that all healthy humans will experience a bout of night-time sleep every day. As a species, humans need sleep in as much as they need food, water and oxygen, without doing so would be fatal. Certainly, with poor sleep a person’s daily quality of life is affected in terms of their ability to function, both physically and mentally and this is an issue some women experience on a regular basis throughout their life.
This book describes women’s sleep over the course of a lifetime and highlights where, how and why sleep may be compromised, and also provides practical solutions for getting better sleep. From adolescence to fertility, pregnancy, parenting, and the perimenopause/menopause, potential sleep issues for women are described throughout the book. Insights into additional areas in a woman’s life where sleep may be compromised are also highlighted such as shift work, caring for family or living with pain. Where sleep disorders may be present, signposting is also provided throughout the book.
This is a book for all health and exercise practitioners and indeed anyone interested in sleep. An aim of the book is that it widens the dialogue between practitioners and their patients/clients around sleep in the hope that improving sleep may indeed help with a woman’s physical and mental health. Sleep after all is the significant impact factor on our overall wellbeing. Having a dialogue around sleep with patients and/or clients is the very essence of this book. And whilst this book is about women’s sleep, it’s not to say men don’t have sleep issues too, far from it, but over the course of a lifetime, there is an overarching difference in men and women’s sleep and this book is here to explain the what’s, how’s and the why’s of it.
Aspects of a woman’s life where sleep may be an issue
Finally, partly this is this book I wished I had had access to when I was working as a physiologist in the world of high-performance sport, supporting athletes and coaches to consistently deliver quality training sessions and achieve their optimal performance in competition. If I had had a resource such as this when first working with athletes, and becoming interested in the area of sleep and performance, it would have been invaluable as a means of understanding the basics of sleep and the how and why we sleep as a human species. Also, the intricacies of sleep across a woman’s lifespan would have been hugely impactful to my practice as across my career as I supported female athletes in several sports. Therefore, I hope this book can be of impact to other practitioners as they develop their careers.
So, if you’re interested in sleep health and want to find out more about it, especially if supporting women in your practice then this is the book for you. The Essential Guide to Women’s Sleep publishes 21st October 2025 and is now available for pre-order.