Study: Letting pets curl up in your bed doesn’t disrupt sleep
For most Americans, dogs are no longer relegated to the doghouse. According to the American Pet Products Association, an industry trade group, almost 60 percent of dog owners say they regard their pet as a child or member of the family. And many let their dogs snuggle up to sleep right in their human owners’ beds, often alongside their owners.
But is sleeping in the same bed with your dog a good idea? Wouldn’t they be disruptive to our sleep?
According to a recent study, not really. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix studied 40 dogs (none were puppies) who slept in the bedroom with their owners. The humans were all generally good sleepers, with no known sleep disorders.
The dogs wore a device that attaches to the collar and records whether an animal is at rest and sleeping or active and at play. The people wore an activity monitor that records people’s movements and whether they are sleeping soundly or not. Both monitors were set to sample movement every minute, while the humans also kept a sleep diary.
Over seven days of testing, the researchers found that with a dog in the bedroom, both the humans and the dogs slept reasonably well. Humans had a mean sleep efficiency, or the percentage of time spent asleep while in bed, of 81 percent, while dogs had a sleep efficiency of 85 percent. Levels over 80 percent are considered satisfactory. People slept slightly better when the dog was off the bed; dogs slept the same whether they were on the bed or in another location in the bedroom.
“This goes against the lore that you should have the dog sleep elsewhere,” and not in the bedroom, said Dr. Lois E. Krahn, the study’s senior author and a psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist at the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Her 6-year-old golden retriever, Phoebe, routinely sleeps on the floor in the bedroom — and in the colder months joins her and her husband on their bed. Both the dog and the people, she said, sleep fine.
In an earlier study from 2015, Krahn and her colleagues asked patients who had visited the Mayo Clinic’s sleep clinic whether they owned dogs, cats or other pets. About half did, with many owning more than one. Forty-one percent said they perceived their pet as unobtrusive or beneficial to their sleep, compared to 20 percent who said their pet was disruptive. That study was self-reported, and “we can’t quite trust people to have an accurate report or even be able to accurately observe their feelings for their pets,” Krahn said. “It’s sort of like a parent’s feelings for their child. I wanted to have objective data.” Hence the recent follow-up report that used activity monitors to get objective data.
Where the pet sleeps “depends on the animal’s temperament,” said Dr. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinarian and the director of animal behavioral science at Penn Vet in Philadelphia. “There are dogs that tend to be more reactive to stimuli. So, for example, if the dog is on the bed and the owner turns and inadvertently hits the dog with the leg, some dogs will get startled and react out of fear,” growling or barking and waking the sleeper, he said. “If there are no problems and the owner is happy with letting the pet in the bedroom, or on the bed, it’s fine with me.”
He added that a dog sleeping in the same room or bed with humans won’t make Sparky think he’s top dog. “Dogs can distinguish between the relationship with its human fellows and other dogs, and the way in which they regulate their interactions with humans in the house is not trying to establish a hierarchy,” he said.
Some dogs may not belong in the bedroom, such as very young or old pets who may not sleep through the night, a sick pet or a reactive pet who might become aggressive when startled or woken up suddenly.