iStockphoto / Robert Daly
French bulldog sleeping in human bed next to feet
Human beings who co-sleep with dogs in their beds can rest even easier at night knowing their decision to share a bed with canine companions is a good one. A new study has found that co-sleeping with dogs in the bed does not negatively impact sleep in humans, though it may have a slight adverse impact on dogs.
There are also potential psychological benefits to be gained that have been shown in previous studies, as well as improves subjective sleep quality.
New Study Finds Sleeping With Dogs In Bed Can Potentially Lead To Better Sleep
The new findings were published this week on PLOS One titled ‘Who is disrupting whom? Examining the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs‘ and the abstract outright states that “both humans and their dogs impact the nighttime activity of one another, demonstrating our species’ inseparable and reciprocal relationship.”
What exactly does all of that mean? Well, it is easier to just explain the study’s findings versus parsing everything out individually.
Using 38 dog-human pairs, dogs and humans were each fitted with sleep trackers for a period of four weeks. The trackers were used to measure objective sleep measures while subjective sleep quality has previously been shown to improve when co-sleeping with dogs.
What they found in this new study is using the objective sleep measurements is that having a dog sleeping in bed did not negatively impact sleep. However, if there were multiple dogs in the bed it could be disrupted.
One of the study’s authors, Lavania Nagendran, told NBC News “When we looked at the subjective, or people’s perceived, sleep, we saw that there were people who reported poor sleep if they had multiple dogs. But, again, that wasn’t seen in the devices.”
This study also looked at previous studies which examined the psychological benefits gained from co-sleeping. They reported “many studies have noted the discordance between objective and subjective sleep quality among pet owners. A review by Andre et al. [21] found that humans reported better subjective sleep quality when sharing a bed with both human and dog co-sleepers, despite worse objective sleep measures. Similarly, even when actigraphy measures indicated that dogs increased sleep disturbances, humans did not report their sleep quality to suffer due to nighttime disruptions by dogs [17,19]. This may reflect the psychological benefits (e.g., feeling safe) of co-sleeping with dogs [17,21].”
What does it all mean?!
The bottom line is that anyone who claims sleeping with a dog in the bed negatively impacts sleep for humans is talking out of their rear end. Science shows otherwise. There are psychological benefits to be gained from co-sleeping, and sleep measurements from this study showed dogs do not disrupt the measured quality in humans.
There are, of course, countless other reasons to keep dogs out of bed. Personal space and time is important. Co-sleeping could introduce germs to the bedroom depending on what the dog’s been digging in all day. But when it comes to sleep quality, the study is sound.