Sleeping with your dog doesn’t mean losing sleep: Study
· Toronto Sun
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Many assume that having a dog sleep in the same bed as their human is more disruptive than anything else, but a study out of the University of Toronto Mississauga is dispelling those theories.
That bond humans and dogs share is just as strong when it’s time to hit the sack, according to researchers Ming Fei Li and Lavania Nagendran, PhD students of UTM’s department of anthropology.
They looked at the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs in a study published in the journal PLOS One and found that many were are on the same wavelength, at least when it came to sleep time.
“I would say my dog disrupts my sleep. But it’s really interesting to know that maybe that’s not actually the case,” Nagendran said in a news release , noting many owners who agreed with her assessment were surprised to learn how well they actually sleep.
Objective vs. subjective sleep
The researchers tracked 25 people and 38 dogs in Southern Ontario over four weeks.
Both owners and their one or multiple dogs each wore a device that tracked their nighttime movements, measuring their objective sleep, meaning how much they actually slept throughout the night.
The humans were also tasked to fill out surveys to share insight on their subjective sleep, or how well they thought they slept.
While the researchers found that co-sleeping with one or multiple dogs did not disrupt objective sleep, the owners thought the contrary, notably those with multiple dogs who reported poorer subjective sleep quality.
More than half (61%) of humans and dogs co-sleepers were found to affect each other’s sleep, and in 45% of those cases, it was actually the humans impacting the dogs’ sleep, not the other way around.
Only 18% of the cases saw that the dog’s initial movement would result in their human moving shortly after.
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So, who’s disturbing whom?
“We’re sharing our space and we’re sharing our routines,” Nagendran said. “More often than not, we’re creating the routines that we have for our dogs and vice versa.
She added: “Our findings show that we’re very much in tune with one another, especially during the nighttime.”
While the authors weren’t surprised by their findings, Li admitted that some of the survey results were unexpected, notably, how nearly three-quarters (72%) of participants reported feeling safer having their dogs with them as they slept.
“Thinking more broadly in terms of our shared evolutionary history, we do think this enhanced safety serves a function to bolster our bond with dogs,” Nagendran said.