Welcome to Pop Culture’s Curiously Defanged Goth Girl Autumn

Autumn may be the most atmospheric season, tantalizing the senses with soft sweaters and warm beverages and the crunch of colorful leaves underfoot. But, as we all suddenly remember once Sept. 30 gives way to Oct. 1, it isn’t all flannel-swaddled, pumpkin-spice ASMR. This is a time charged with the contradictions inherent in the end of the calendar—cozy and eerie, Thanksgiving and Halloween, harvest and decay. The entertainment industry offers up its own autumnal cornucopia of contrasts. Sandwiched between chummy fall baking competitions and the anodyne made-for-TV Christmas movies that arrive earlier each year is a dollop of bloody, gory, nightmare-inducing horror on screens big and small.

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Falling somewhere between the two is a third spooky-season sensibility—one epitomized this year by the reunion of Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton in a blockbuster sequel to their classic undead comedy Beetlejuice: goth. With aesthetic roots in pre-Victorian Gothic fiction, goth was adapted into a black-shrouded subculture by fans of melancholic 1980s British rock bands like the Cure and Cocteau Twins and has, since then, been sliced, diced, and spliced into dozens of divergent factions. I’m using it here in the broadest sense. It’s dark, it’s spooky, it’s romantic, it’s death-obsessed. It’s velvet and lace and vampires and witches and black cats and dripping candles and séances conducted by Ouija board. It has the trappings of horror but no interest in jump scares. And more often than not, especially as it approaches a half-century of existence, goth has a campy sense of humor about its own melodrama.

Goth’s mainstream profile tends to ebb and surge, and the past few years have seen a new wave of macabre media that seems to be cresting this fall. (What says goth revival more than the Cure releasing its first new song in 16 years, a few days after the autumnal equinox?) In a recent Vogue
essay trumpeting fashion’s rediscovery of morbid beauty, Tish Weinstock—whose forthcoming book How to Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style is itself a bellwether—identifies a “full-blown gothic resurrection” and proclaims: “welcome to the season of the witch.” Weinstock is right to name witches as the supreme goth signifier of 2024. Every retro movement gets repackaged to suit the era into which it’s reborn. And from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to Agatha All Along, this year’s extra-comforting model has an aspirational girl-power quality grounded in nostalgia for the goth-pop artifacts of the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

Tracing the origins of the goth aesthetic is a fool’s errand. While the subculture coalesced within a music scene transitioning from ’70s punk to ’80s new wave, the sensibility has no discrete genesis. It predates proto-goth touchstones like Rocky Horror, the droning decadence of The Velvet Underground and Nico, silent-film vamp Theda Bara, the chilling fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, Dracula and Frankenstein. Goth did not even begin with the eponymous Germanic tribes that raided the waning Roman Empire. Insofar as it is entails the romanticization of death and the occult, the goth worldview might be as old as human society—a Freudian, death-drive fixation that’s as apparent in the funereal traditions of Ancient Egypt as it is in Chappell Roan’s velvet, chainmail, and crucifix VMAs ensemble.

Goth as we know it today can, however, be loosely sorted into eras. If the early scene was predominantly about music and nightlife, then by the late ’80s goth had become a full-on pop phenomenon, spawning superstars like filmmaker Burton and author Anne Rice, with Marilyn Manson and Hot Topic mass-producing PVC-clad rebellion for the ’90s mallrat. A binary of sorts emerged, with such aggressively masculine variations as the industrial rock of Manson and his mentor at the time, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, on one side and a witchier, female-driven vibe on the other. This was a decade bookended by riot grrrl’s feminist-punk energy and the neopagan, earth mother ethos of Lilith Fair; goth girls synthesized aspects of both movements, white magic and white-hot rage.

In 1988, Burton gave that audience an icon in Ryder’s Beetlejuice heroine, Lydia Deetz, who dressed like a miniature Siouxsie Sioux and moved into a country house where only she had the ability to see the ghosts of its previous owners. Ryder grew into an offbeat romantic lead with Burton’s 1990 cult classic Edward Scissorhands, the teen black comedy Heathers, and Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Dracula. Following in her combat-booted footsteps, Christina Ricci broke out by reviving the deadpan ’60s proto-goth icon Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, romanced a friendly ghost in Casper, and entered the Burton-sphere with 1999’s Sleepy Hollow. By then the witchy girl was everywhere, forming outcast covens in The Craft, fighting supernatural baddies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, all grown up and empowered to destroy abusive boyfriends in Practical Magic.

While there have been short-lived resurgences in the 21st century (see: Twilight), it’s primarily this strain of goth that is driving the current nostalgia fest. September’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gives Lydia a brooding teenage daughter of her own in Ryder’s closest Gen Z analog, Jenna Ortega. Ortega also plays the title role in Burton’s incredibly popular teen-drama twist on the Addams Family, Netflix’s Wednesday. An adult Ricci (who has also been revisiting her ’90s weird-girl persona in Showtime’s Yellowjackets), appears appears as one of Wednesday’s teachers. Those who crave a more tactile connection with the actor’s dark brand can shop Ricci’s recent West Elm collab, which features tarot cards. A musical adaptation of Death Becomes Her, the 1992 goth-camp comedy that pit Meryl Streep against Goldie Hawn in an orgy of cartoon violence, is about to open on Broadway; Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste” video, also starring Ortega, pays homage to the same movie. And if you just want to watch vintage Ryder, Criterion Channel is honoring her with an October retrospective.

Sequels and reboots and rereleases may be the linchpins of Hollywood’s nostalgia-industrial complex, but goth’s comeback goes beyond the reanimation of dormant titles. The new Disney+ series Agatha All Along is about as original as Marvel shows get. A once-fearsome witch, Kathryn Hahn’s WandaVision villain Agatha Harkness convenes a makeshift coven to flank her on a perilous journey that might restore her lost powers. The show celebrates and sends up all sorts of witchy archetypes, writing into its lore a ’70s singer à la Stevie Nicks and a wellness influencer mixing up toxic potions. Eighties-set teen comedy Lisa Frankenstein, released this past winter, finds a misfit girl falling for the gentle Victorian zombie who follows her home from the cemetery. Soundtracked by period-appropriate indie rock, the movie is itself a Frankenstein’s monster of influences, from Beetlejuice to the 1992 B-movie that kicked off the Buffy franchise. Its very existence confirms the longevity of a previous generation’s dark teen tropes.

What are we looking for when we flock to these paradoxically pleasurable paeans to monsters and magic, mortality and the afterlife? In an interview with the Guardian, Weinstock, the How to Be a Goth author, ventured that “there’s so much sadness and violence in the world that it’s beginning to seep into and shape the culture…. It’s a form of escapism but it’s also a reality check that reminds us we’re living through scary, uncertain times.”

I’m not so sure about that. The girly goth talismans we’re clinging to now are relics of a more upbeat era, when the economy was coasting and the Cold War was ending and the daughters of second-wave feminists were inventing new ways to inhabit their power. While some of us will always feel the temptation to immerse ourselves in the gloomy and supernatural, the more potent form of escapism at play in this revival is nostalgia for the recent past. One perennial lure of the goth subculture, with its Victorian wardrobe and Expressionist makeup, is its ability to untether adherents from the present. “Goth’s interest in the timeless,” writes the critic Simon Reynolds in his post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again, “could be seen as precisely that—a refusal of the timely, the topical, the urgent issues of the day.” It supplants the sadness and violence we know with dark fairy tales too remote from reality to demand our engagement with real-world problems.

Goth ca. 2024 may not visually resemble the cardigan-core of Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore era, but, like a certain seasonal latte, it’s delivering pure comfort. You might notice that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels cozier than its predecessor; while both have the same rural idyll as a backdrop, the sequel de-emphasizes the original’s uncomfortable framing of Lydia as a child bride to the titular ghoul in favor of a plot that repairs broken bonds between generations of Deetz women. Or that Wednesday is set at a boarding school for outcasts, monsters, and practitioners of magic—shades of Harry Potter. Or that Agatha eases its underworld odyssey with camp-savvy faces: Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone. Meanwhile, one recent Gen X goth IP revival that bombed was a convoluted, self-serious reboot of the 1994 revenge fantasy The Crow, which earned $9 million at the domestic
box office to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s $266 million and counting.

Maybe that’s why the most successful of these titles have been hitting like any other fall-sploitation trifle, enjoyable but forgettable, Hallmark Christmas specials for viewers who prefer
Halloween. Just as we line up in autumn for an annual round of virus-season vaccines, we might seek out these morbid fantasies, each its own plush sensory overload, as an inoculation against the pain of processing war, misogyny, political upheaval. The entertainment itself is surprisingly benign. Scarier by far is the impulse that drives us to it.

source https://time.com/7081181/beetlejuice-agatha-all-along-goth-nostalgia/

See Photos of the Wreckage from Hurricane Milton in Florida

Hurricane Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Florida on Wednesday night, reportedly killing at least four people and bringing further devastation to a state still reeling from the impact of another hurricane the week prior. 

Milton hit Florida as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 120 mph, but was downgraded to a Category 1 storm as it made its way across the state. More than 3 million people were left without power. Ahead of the storm’s arrival, millions of people in the Tampa area were placed under evacuation orders. 

The storm was originally predicted to be a Category 5 storm, but weakened significantly before landing. The worst storm surge came in at eight to 10 feet in Sarasota County.

Milton arrived just one week after Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, brought widespread destruction to Florida, with its death toll climbing to at least 230 people across several states in the South.

As of Thursday morning, a tropical storm warning was still in effect for parts of the east coast of Florida into South Carolina and a storm surge warning was in effect for parts of Florida and Georgia. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Thursday morning that, while the extent of the damage was still unknown, Milton “was not the worst case scenario.”

Here are photos of the wreckage caused by Milton as it tore through Florida.

source https://time.com/7085641/hurricane-milton-florida-photos/

Tons of Viruses Live in Your Toothbrush and Showerhead

Forget about public restrooms: It turns out your own bathroom is teeming with viruses.

Researchers at Northwestern University studied two things that most people use everyday—their toothbrush and showerhead—to see what was living in each.

What they found was “quite surprising,” says Erica Hartmann, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern who led the study that focused on identifying virus species lurking in the bathroom. Most unexpected, she adds, was “how little we could identify that looked like something we had seen before. We found an incredible amount of diversity, which highlights how little we know and how much more we have to explore and discover.”

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But before you throw out your toothbrush or take apart your shower, keep in mind that the vast majority of viruses Hartmann and her team found were specific species known as bacteriophages, or viruses that almost exclusively infect bacterial cells and not human ones. Scientists have known about phages for nearly a century, but only recently developed the tools needed to identify and study them in more detail.

“We know so little about phages,” says Hartmann, who published her findings Oct. 9 in the journal Frontiers in Microbiomes. “But understanding them and expanding our horizons in microbiology could have profound implications elsewhere.”

Read More: How Much Do You Actually Need to Shower?

Researchers, scientists, and drug developers already exploit phages and their ability to infect bacteria to better understand and deliver compounds that might kill certain bacteria. Those efforts could lead to more effective antimicrobial options that don’t involve antibiotics, against which bacteria can develop resistance quickly. “Phages are super fascinating and represent what I call the next frontier in biology or microbiology,” says Hartmann.

The study was inspired by a previous one in which she and her team catalogued the bacteria found in bathrooms after people expressed concerns about whether bacteria spewed into the air every time they flushed their toilet, potentially contaminating their toothbrushes. In that study, Hartmann’s team concluded the fear was unfounded, since most of the bacteria they identified were strains that originated in people’s mouths. This time, they turned their attention to viruses—and found the universe of phages.

The good news is that since phages don’t infect human cells, “I don’t think anything in our results gives reason to be concerned,” says Hartmann. “There is absolutely nothing to worry about, so there is no reason to throw out your toothbrush because of this.”

What the findings do reveal, however, is that there is a world of phages ripe for exploration. “Even identifying the ones on toothbrushes and showerheads expands what we know about phage biology and can help us explain why phage therapies do or don’t work in different contexts,” she says. “And the more we learn, the better that will inform things in phage-based therapeutics.”

Read More: Reading This Will Make You Want to Floss

The diversity of what the researchers found—no two toothbrushes or two showerheads harbored the same population of phages—bodes well for the vast catalogue of phages that might become the foundation for new treatments. The findings also broaden our understanding of the range of effects that microbes can have on humans, both good and bad. “We don’t know exactly which microbes we are exposed to and when, or how they promote health or well-being,” says Hartmann. “But in general, it’s important to look at the microbes around us with an air of wonder and curiosity rather than fear. If we can figure out what all of the microbes are doing, and how they are doing it, we can be more intentional about how we care for things like toothbrushes—and in turn, care for ourselves and our environments better.”

source https://time.com/7071966/viruses-bacteria-toothbrush-showerhead/

Why Hand Counting Ballots Could Create an Election Disaster

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Mark Kampf was determined to count the ballots by hand, lawsuit after lawsuit against him be damned. The year was 2022 and Kampf was the newly elected county clerk for Nye County, Nev., after campaigning on a platform that included adherence to the lie that the last presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In Kampf’s mind, running a clean election meant not trusting the process used in 2020. So instead of using machines, Kampf was going to hand count 20,000 ballots in a week.

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After two weeks of court battles that stretched past Election Day, Kampf finally had the go ahead to launch his team of hundreds of volunteers—mostly older residents who had the time to go through the arduous task of tabulating the results. They got through 2,500 ballots on that first day. But despite working in groups of three, as many as a quarter of the ballots had to be read a second time because of obvious errors.

Eventually, Kampf resorted to machines to complete the official count. Nye County’s folly is just one example of a pattern that is remarkably consistent: outside of the tiniest jurisdictions, hand counting is hard, slow, expensive, and highly unreliable. And if Kampf’s count of 1-in-4 ballots being read incorrectly is accurate, he actually did better than most. A study from Rice University estimated that hand counts got the results right just 58% of the time. Machine-based voting has an error rate of less than 1%, according to two decades of research.

And yet, if this election brings about anything akin to the chaos we saw after Election Day 2020, hand counting might be a major culprit. Despite all the evidence against the practice, Georgia’s top elections board is plowing ahead with a scheme to count by hand every ballot in a state of more than 8 million registered voters.

The frankly ludicrous decision came about after the five-person board found itself overrun by election deniers. The boneheaded move has drawn bipartisan criticism, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

This is exactly why Democrats on Sept. 30 filed a lawsuit to block this potential folly. It’s got a good chance to proceed, as even Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State says the election board waited too long to institute such a dramatic change of rules.

While shutting down Georgia’s hand count plan could spur conspiracy theories that the vote is rigged, keeping it in place could do even more damage to trust in the state’s elections. Despite right-wing conspiracy theories about inaccurate voting machines and a desire to go back to paper-and-ink ballots, the perils of hacking or tinkering are just not justified. Fueled by disinformation and sheer cynicism, Trump’s belief that the 2020 election was stolen simply has no basis in fact.

Those pesky facts have not stopped the push at all levels of government to go back to yesteryear. Legislators and elected officials, recognizing their jobs are always in peril if they seem to ignore constituents, have humored to varying degrees this camp. Typically, though, they have found ways to illustrate why machines are a quicker, cheaper, and more accurate way to getting the right results on the right timeline.

To be fair, hand counting still works in small jurisdictions. In New Hampshire, 114 towns still count by hand—or roughly 10% of the state’s voters. Those are typical of the smaller places where this style is popular: mostly single-precinct municipalities. Nationwide, fewer than 0.2% of Americans live in such places as most voters live in communities where such small-bore efforts make no sense as a practical matter.

But consider the scale needed on ballots with loads of questions and races. In 2020, Cobb County, Ga., ordered a hand count of just the presidential votes. It took hundreds of people five full days to get through a little fewer than 400,000 ballots. What Georgia is asking for now is for tallying every single ballot line—White House contenders, state-level races, questions about taxes, the creation of a state tax court, even who would sit on the local soil and water board. In Fulton County alone, a sample ballot this year includes more than 50 possible races. More than a half-million votes were cast there in 2020. Statewide, we’re now talking about a universe of about 5 million anticipated ballots.

“To roll something like this out at the last minute seems like a really, really terrible idea,” says Gowri Ramachandran, director of Elections and Security in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government, which focuses on improving elections. “It’s really hard for me to understand what benefit anyone thinks that’s adding.” 

We have to go all the way back to 2004 to find an election year in which even 1% of the nation’s votes were ballots hand counted, reports MIT’s Election Lab. Two decades later, more than 90% of jurisdictions use electronic counting exclusively. There’s a reason this method has been shelved everywhere except one-stoplight towns.

Consider these warning signs from other states: 

• Officials in Mohave County, Ariz., decided against hand-counting ballots for this year after the elections chief ran a trial run last year with just 850 ballots. A team of seven people took three, eight-hour days to complete the work and still had 46 errors. That 5% error rate was better than most, but it was still dramatically higher than what machines yielded, and expanding to a full election year would have cost an extra $1 million, including 245 new workers.
• When Shasta County, Calif., considered moving to a hand count last year, the county clerk calculated the costs at millions of dollars, including $1 million just for new equipment—essentially really good calculators—and 375 extra staffers. But the county nonetheless is moving ahead with it, and even recently hired a newcomer with zero experience to take over as elections chief, prompting statewide fears of a fiasco next month if Shasta County’s count takes too long or isn’t trusted.

Social psychologists, voting experts, and mathematicians alike have all uniformly said machines still do better than humans with repetitive tasks like counting ballots. Not only do machines count at a far cheaper rate, they are faster and just plain better at it.

Back in Nye County, Nev., after Kampf, the election chief, resorted to machine counting ballots in 2022, he told reporters the hand count had merely been a test and a safeguard. By the time preparations for this year’s counting began, he decided on another option: he resigned, effective on March 31.

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source https://time.com/7071959/election-2024-hand-count-ballots/

Biden Can End His Failure in the Middle East—if He Listens to the American People

For the past 12 months, the world has watched in horror as Israel has laid waste to Gaza in what Palestinians and many experts consider a genocidal military campaign—one of the most lethal and destructive bombing campaigns in history—armed and funded by the U.S. government.

The U.S. has spent at least $17.9 billion in weapons for Israel and that staggering sum continues to grow; the Biden Administration in August approved a further $20 billion.

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This support for Israel violates both U.S. and international law. It also goes against the wishes of a majority of Americans. Polls consistently show that most Americans want a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop weapons transfers to Israel (including 77% of Democrats) amid the death and destruction.

At least 42,000 Palestinians, including over 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza. A further 96,000 people have been wounded there. Nearly 2 million people in the Strip have also been displaced. These are staggering figures. 

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s military and settlers have launched a wave of violent repression while the world’s attention has been focused on Gaza. At least 722 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers; more than 1,600 people have also been driven out of their homes amid a huge expansion in illegal settlements. A recent report from the watchdog Peace Now called one seizure in the Jordan Valley the “the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo accords.”

It’s critical to put the past year in context and remember that the violence we Palestinians face did not begin in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Most people in Gaza are refugees whose families were expelled from their homes in what became Israel in 1948. They have lived under violent, oppressive Israeli military rule since the occupation began in 1967. And for over 17 years prior to Oct. 7, Israel imposed a suffocating siege and naval blockade on Gaza—condemned as illegal by the U.N. and rights groups—that controlled who and what went in and out. The blockade plunged much of Gaza’s already impoverished population further into despair.

Now the nightmare of Gaza—the stench of corpses, the widespread destruction, the incessant buzzing of military drones—is spreading to Lebanon. The death toll has topped 2,000 in recent weeks while more than 1 million of the country’s 5 million people have been displaced amid fierce Israeli airstrikes. Israel has also begun a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.

Read More: ‘We Can’t Predict What Israel Will Do.’ Inside the Fear and Chaos Gripping Lebanon

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government seem intent in dragging the U.S. into a war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. Will President Biden finally draw a red line to stop Israel’s escalation? So far, there has been no evidence he is prepared to rein in Netanyahu.

Clearly no one benefits from Israel’s war footing—certainly not the innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon suffering now, nor the American people.

Yet Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris aren’t listening to most Americans’ wishes. Harris has pledged “unwavering” support for Israel and declared that she won’t impose conditions on weapons transfer to Israel if she’s elected in November. Donald Trump has vowed that the U.S. and Israel would become “closer” than ever if he were President again.

If there is any hope for peace, it must come from the American people demanding a change in U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. They must demand that the noble values their country professes—equality and justice for all—be applied to their government’s treatment of Palestinians, Lebanese, and others in the region as well.

In many ways our situation as Palestinians has never felt more hopeless. Freedom is a far-off dream when one’s own very survival is in question. The hope I have is that the growing global consciousness about the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the apartheid regime in Israel and the occupied territories will move us a step closer to our collective liberation and an end to the horrors we have endured for far too long.

A great American once said the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. But it does not bend on its own. It is up to each of us to create the kind of world we want to live in—one that respects the dignity of every person and the sanctity of every life.

source https://time.com/7071948/biden-us-support-israel-gaza-palestinians/

Wimbledon Tennis Tournament Replaces Line Judges With AI Technology in Break With Tradition

LONDON — That long-held Wimbledon tradition of line judges dressed in elegant uniforms is no more.

The All England Club announced Wednesday that artificial intelligence will be used to make the ‘out’ and ‘fault’ calls at the championships from 2025.

Wimbledon organizers said the decision to adopt live electronic line calling was made following extensive testing at the 2024 tournament and “builds on the existing ball-tracking and line-calling technology that has been in place for many years.”

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“We consider the technology to be sufficiently robust and the time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating,” said Sally Bolton, chief executive of the All England Club. “For the players, it will offer them the same conditions they have played under at a number of other events on tour.”

Bolton said Wimbledon had a responsibility to “balance tradition and innovation.”

“Line umpires have played a central role in our officiating set-up at the championships for many decades,” she said, “and we recognize their valuable contribution and thank them for their commitment and service.”

Line-calling technology has long been used at Wimbledon and other tennis tournaments to call whether serves are in or out.

The All England Club also said Wednesday that the ladies’ and gentlemen’s singles finals will be scheduled to take place at the later time of 4 p.m. local time on the second Saturday and Sunday, respectively — and after doubles finals on those days.

Bolton said the moves have been made to ensure the day of the finals “builds towards the crescendo of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s singles finals, with our champions being crowned in front of the largest possible worldwide audience.”

source https://time.com/7081166/wimbledon-tennis-tournament-replaces-line-judges-with-ai-technology/

Why Do Some People Need More Sleep Than Others?

My bed and I spend less time together than the experts say we should. Most nights, my head hits the pillow around 11:00 pm, and I’m up—without an alarm—at 5:30 am. That six and a half hours of shuteye puts me behind the seven to nine hours the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society recommend for adults. Does it hurt me? Not so I can tell.

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I may be a bit of an outlier as far as the guidelines are concerned, but I am by no means alone. Our sleep needs change over the course of our lifetimes—from 17 hours a day as a newborn, to up to 12 hours as a schoolkid, to the seven- to nine-hour benchmark for adults. But those figures are just averages. Plenty of people, like me, get by on significantly less for their age, while others require a good bit more. What is it that makes some folks short sleepers, some folks long sleepers, and others smack-in-the-middle sleepers? A lot of things, as it turns out.

Your sex matters—a little

When it comes to the differing sleep needs of men and women, one of the most commonly cited statistics is that women require more—but only by a tiny bit, about 11 extra minutes a night. The finding comes from a 2013 study in the American Sociological Review that surveyed nearly 73,000 participants in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. The sample group included only people in the 18 to 64 age range—eliminating the youngest and oldest respondents, whose sleep needs often fall on the highest and lowest end of the scale—to arrive at the small but statistically significant difference.

The researchers cited a range of factors that might explain the small gap—including the round-the-clock responsibilities of unpaid housework, which women still perform more commonly than men—and few opportunities for catch-up naps during the day.

The American Sleep Foundation reports additional possible explanations, including menstruation, menopause, and pregnancy, all of which can interrupt sleep and lead to women staying in bed a little bit longer to make up for the periodic awakenings. Other findings suggest that women fall asleep a bit faster than men, meaning that they enter their sleep cycle with an edge of a few minutes. And then, of course, there’s the burden of caring for children—especially small children—which falls more heavily on mothers than fathers.

“When you have kids, you’re always dealing with them,” says Dan Gartenberg, an adjunct professor in biobehavioral health at Penn State University and CEO of Sleepspace, a sleep-assistance app. “Women may report having to get more sleep simply because they’re being woken up all the time.” Still, while more studies have been conducted on male-female sleep differences since the one in 2013, they have not turned up anything dramatic. “Honestly, the effect for gender is small,” says Gartenberg.

The wages of insomnia

About one in three adults worldwide experiences insomnia—or the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep—at any given time, according to the Cleveland Clinic. About one in 10 suffer from the chronic form of the condition. known as insomnia disorder, which is defined as three or more nights of sleep problems per week lasting three or more months. Insomnia can occur at different phases of the sleep cycle. So-called initial insomnia involves difficulty falling asleep; maintenance insomnia occurs when you wake up in the middle of the night but are able to go back to sleep; and late insomnia is waking up too early and being unable to go back to sleep. A lot of things can cause insomnia, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain, acid reflux, a family history of sleep problems, and stressful life circumstances that make it difficult to unwind. 

By definition, people with insomnia get less rest, which increases their need to stay in bed longer fighting to sleep or finding the time to nap during the day. “If your sleep is very broken up, you’re going to need more of it,” says Gartenberg.

There are several treatments for insomnia. Benzodiazepines and sedative-hypnotics are options, but also dangerous ones, as they can lead to dependency and addiction. What’s more, they lead to poor quality of sleep. “Ambien, for example, is not meant to be used every day because it’s going to reduce your deep sleep,” says Gartenberg.

Other, safer options include such sleep-hygiene strategies as going to bed and getting up at the same time every day; avoiding over-the-counter stimulants like certain cold medicines; limiting TV time or other stimulating activities before bed; and taking a bath, listening to soothing music or meditating in the evening. The goal, says Gartenberg, is to achieve sleep that is “regenerative and consolidated”—restful without medications and, if possible, without interruption. The closer you get to those twin goals, the more your sleep needs will fall back into the recommendations for your age.

The role of sleep apnea

Next to insomnia, apnea—or the periodic cessation of breathing during sleep, leading to micro-awakenings or full awakenings throughout the night—is the most common sleep disorder. “About 20% of the U.S. population has sleep apnea, which is technically defined as literally choking five times an hour or more,” says Gartenberg. “If you have a severe case, you’re choking 100 times per hour.” In addition, he adds, about half of the population who do not meet the technical definition of sleep apnea have suboptimal breathing during sleep, choking two to four times per hour.

There are two types of sleep apnea, each with its own cause. Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the muscles in the back of the throat relax and collapse during sleep, cutting off breathing. Central sleep apnea occurs when the brain fails to send signals to the central nervous system instructing respiration to take place. Overall, men are two to three times more likely to suffer from apnea than women. About 4% of women have a related condition known as upper airway resistance, that can also disrupt breathing and sleep, according to Gartenberg. That condition occurs in only 1.5% of men.

As with insomnia, apnea can cause people to require more hours of sleep, as they try to make up for the disruptions and awakenings that occur over the course of the night. The worse the apnea is, the more catch-up time may be required. There are multiple treatments for apnea, including weight loss, CPAP sleep masks, implantable devices, and surgery.

Screwy circadian rhythms

Your body is a walking clock, built to respond to the cycles of the day. We awaken as the sun rises, sleep after it sets, and go through peaks and valleys of high and low energy in between—with the greatest highs occurring two to four hours after we wake up and again before the dinner hour, according to Gartenberg. But as technology takes us further and further from the state of nature, our circadian clock is coming unsprung.

“Since the invention of the light bulb, we’re getting the wrong signals based on our circadian rhythms, which is hindering our sleep quality and our ability to have a regenerative night’s sleep,” says Gartenberg.

If the problem began in the late 19th century, it’s being turbocharged in the early 21st. We cocoon ourselves in brightly lighted cities, where 56% of the world’s population lives; work remotely at all hours—no need to follow a nine-to-five schedule if you can wake up, log on, and put in your time whenever you want; and spend our days and nights in front of screens, which bathe us in blue light, a wavelength that suppresses the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. All of this leads to poor-quality sleep and the need for more than the baseline for your age.

It’s not necessary to move out of the city or ditch your electronics to recalibrate your internal clock. Instead, you can nudge it into alignment by imposing a regular structure on your day. Try to wake up at the same time every morning and go to bed at the same time every night, exercise during those morning or early evening peaks, have your meals at set hours, avoid eating dinner too close to bedtime, and power down your phone or tablet an hour or two before sleep. 

The role of the genes

It is the rare person who can get by on just four and a half hours of sleep—but those individuals exist. Not only do they need relatively little slumber, they also tend to score higher than average on tests of energy, optimism, and pain tolerance. Those people, known as short sleepers, have been found by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco to have a mutation in seven genes that play a role in regulating sleep and, the studies suggest, mood—though to date they have published papers only on four of them.

“There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don’t get it,” Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at UCSF and the co-discoverer of the short sleeper genes, told TIME in 2020. “But that’s as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It’s just not true.” 

Still, no one suggests that it’s terribly common to have short sleep written in your DNA. So far, only about 50 families with the short-sleeper genes have been identified.

A few sleep hacks

• Go easy on alcohol and cannabis: Even a little bit of drinking can scramble your sleep—helping you drift off more easily, perhaps, but causing you to awaken more during the night. Additionally, when you have alcohol in your system before bed, you get less rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deepest sleep phase. “Alcohol totally wrecks sleep quality,” Gartenberg says. Cannabis, similarly, has sleep-inducing benefits in the early part of the night, but sleep-disturbing effects later.
• Get some variety in your day: One of the reasons babies sleep so much is because they spend their waking hours vacuuming up information about the world. Consolidation of this information happens during sleep, so babies need to conk out early and often to preserve what they’ve learned. That doesn’t change in adulthood—meaning that the more novel experiences you have, the better you might sleep at night. “If you’re riding your bike and follow the same route again and again, maybe instead go a different route,” says Gartenberg. “When we learn and expose ourselves to more information, there’s actually an effect where you get more deep sleep.”
• Figure out your natural sleep cycle. The next time you’re on vacation, take the time to learn about yourself. Rather than setting an alarm every day and dashing off to an activity, try going to bed at the same time for at least three nights running and not setting an alarm at all. Ideally, you will sleep until your body determines it has had enough. “This is a close estimation of what your unique sleep needs are,” says Gartenberg. If you’re sleeping, say, eight and a half hours, you can make sure you get to bed early enough when you get back home so that you can log that much time each night.

source https://time.com/7064982/how-much-sleep-do-you-need-health/