Photo: TikTok
It's tiring to be a woman. Not just because they have to deal with men, but simply because they exist.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on May 09, 2023
A woman on TikTok has recently gone viral after validating the feelings of millions of women on the social media platform. The video she posted just a day ago, on May 8, 2023, has received over 4 million views and nearly 5,000 comments.
Most of the comments come from women that agreed with what “@bigdawgstatuss’s” video was all about — being a woman every day around 3 to 5 PM.
She claimed that it’s 'exhausting' to be a woman from 3 PM to 5 PM.
Alongside the caption that reads “Desperately needing a lay” is the song “Just A Girl” by “No Doubt,” and a video that shows how exhausting it is to be a woman in the mid-afternoon.
“Men don’t understand how exhausting it is to be a girl from 3-5pm,” reads the overlay in the video as the short 14-second video shows two women hanging out with a man at a picnic table.
The women are very visibly tired, resting their heads on their arms, looking visibly “done with it,” and flat-out laying down at one point, while the man looks like he just woke up from a 10-hour night of sleep.
Of course, it doesn’t help that it looks like the three of them are all day drinking — the man drinking a beer while the women appear to be drinking some kind of cocktail — but the women look significantly more tired than the man who looks to be having a grand time.
“Bigdawgstatuss’s” explanation is that, because they’re women, it’s normal for them to be so tired around this 3-5 PM period, and they might actually be onto something.
“Is this a universal thing,” asks the top comment on the video. “I LOVE FEELING VALIDATED,” another woman comments, as a third gets real. “Hold up — is this a real thing because I genuinely feel like death from like 2-5 and then I’m ready to party again.”
There’s a scientific reason why women are so tired from 3 to 5 PM.
The times differ depending on age, but around the 2 to 5 PM mark, there’s a concept that people have dubbed the “afternoon slump” thanks to the way our natural clocks operate. Given that women are more prone to iron deficiency, they are also more likely to experience this fatigue.
Our circadian rhythms are to blame for why some people might feel tired around this mid-afternoon time, men and women. GoodRx suggests that the afternoon slump is a totally normal part of our sleep-wake cycles, but there are ways to combat them.
Aside from this potentially normal process that occurs on a daily basis, there is another cycle that could be blamed for why women specifically may feel the impact of the afternoon slump much more intensely — the menstrual cycle.
Women operate on a 28-day hormonal cycle called the menstrual cycle, while men operate on a 24-hour hormonal cycle that lines up perfectly with the workday — who’d have thought the patriarchy was to blame?
Yes, women’s cycles don’t always perfectly line up with 28 days, but the point is that their hormones operate on a monthly basis rather than a daily basis, meaning that men’s cycles will be much more consistent than women’s since we, as a society, exist on a 24-hour daily schedule.
According to the Sleep Foundation, there are various links between the days leading up to menstruation, as well as the menstruation itself, and insomnia.
“Hormonal changes before and during menstruation may harm sleep through effects on body temperature and melatonin production,” they suggest, adding that progesterone (which increases after ovulation until the late-luteal phase) may increase body temperature to the extent that can cause fragmented sleep.
Whatever the case, it seems like there is a real, scientific reason for your afternoon slump, so while there are ways to combat it, don’t worry too much about it.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.