If you like to share the bed with your beloved dogs, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that this could be disturbing your sleep throughout the night. The good news is that it is only by the smallest amounts.
A new study, published in the open access journal PLOS One found that sharing a bed with your pet did not significantly impact sleep duration or sleep quality. This was even in cases where owners reported feeling like their dogs were disturbing their sleep.
To find this out, a team of researchers examined the night time activity of 25 humans and their 38 dogs. This was done over a period of four weeks, using wrist monitors for humans and collar ones for dogs.
Night time activity was strongly correlated between the two groups, with humans and their dogs commonly becoming active around the same time in the night. More often than not, the humans began moving before the dogs did, suggesting that owners are disturbing their dog’s sleep more than the other way around.
So, who is disturbing who? Well, it seems to be a bit of both actually. These results align with previous research on both the benefits and drawbacks of co-sleeping with dogs. The authors do note though that this study includes a limited sample and no dog-less control group.
“Our findings suggest that nighttime activity in humans and dogs is closely coupled and there may be discrepancies between objective and subjective sleep measures,” the authors of the study said.
More importantly, while no evidence for biological and demographic impacts was found, owners who had multiple dogs had worse self-reported sleep than those with just one dog.
For now, more research needs to be done to find out exactly what happens when we share a bed with man’s best friend.
