My sweet dog Willie Nelson is in his golden years—that long stretch of vaguely declining health and general slowing down that every pet parent braces for. Every night, he “jumps” (or, more often, is lifted) onto the bed and we snuggle in for a good night’s sleep filled with his snoring and snorting and kicking and rearranging … until I get up around 3 a.m. and move to the guest room.
Yes, sleeping with our pets can be problematic. But I would never kick him out: It’s not Willie’s fault I’m a light sleeper, and it took us forever to haul him up on the bed in the first place. And now, a new study confirms that co-sleeping has its downsides—not necessarily for you, but for your dog.
Ahead, I’ll take you through the results of this new research that totally upends what we think we know about humans, dogs and sleep. Read on to learn how your sleeping arrangements might be affecting everyone in your family, furry members included.
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Are we really interrupting our dogs’ beauty rest?
Yes, we are, according to new research by scientists at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The study, which was published in Plos One, was on the small side, but it looked at 25 human participants and their 38 canine counterparts to find out how sleep patterns were affected by co-sleeping.
To do this, researchers outfitted dogs and owners with sleep monitors, and found that 61% of the subject “dyads” (aka the individual pairs of humans and dogs studied) moved together at some point in the night. But of that majority of interspecies co-sleepers who were in tandem, it was usually the human who moved first—not the dog.
Yep, in nearly half (45%) of the dyads that showed movement, it was the person who was doing the disturbing first. Could my dog, Willie, be off the hook for my banishment to the spare bedroom? I don’t quite believe it, but researchers have some pretty good numbers to back it up.
They measured both objective activity levels (using sleep monitors) and subjective variables, including the perception of sleep quality (which unfortunately our dogs can’t answer). They found that our belief that Fido is preventing us from sleeping, and not the other way around, might be a misperception, though the authors say more study is needed.
Could this be a problem for our pups?
Researchers didn’t come to any conclusions about how these results could be affecting our animals. But as any of us who have been roused out of our REM cycle in the middle of the night—only to stare at the ceiling, attempt to count sheep or give up and read a book—can attest, lack of sleep is bad for you and, presumably, your dog too.
Sleep studies in dogs aren’t too common, but 2022 research published in Animals found that dogs who got less than eight to 10 hours of sleep were more likely to receive a higher “problem behavior score” by their owners. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports found that sleep can affect learning in dogs under certain situations, and an earlier one from 2017, published in the same journal, reported that dogs learn while sleeping, just like people do.
So given what we know about how important sleep is for humans, combined with this new data on dogs, it seems logical to conclude that sleep disruptions could be affecting their overall well-being, similar to how they affect ours. But sleep in dogs is still a relatively untapped field of study, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Are dogs interrupting our sleep too?
My anecdotal evidence aside, apparently not. Researchers in this study found that among the majority of participants whose sleep moves correlated with their dogs’ movements, the dogs moved first only 18% of the time. (Compare that with the 45% of the time we prompt movement in our pups.)
And when it came to objectively measured sleep patterns, like sleep duration and sleep efficiency in humans and overall nighttime activity in dogs, co-sleeping had no effect on either party. In the subjective measurements, humans reported poorer sleep only when they had more than one dog, even though the objective measurements didn’t back up their assumptions.
Interestingly, dogs that slept in the same room with their humans but not on the same bed were more likely to disrupt their owners’ sleep. Overall, researchers note the need for larger, more robust studies of dog-and-human sleep patterns. Willie and I will wait eagerly for this emerging research, but one thing I can tell you is that he’s not moving.
Sources:
- PLOS One: “Who is disrupting whom? Examining the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs”
- Animals: “Sleep Characteristics in Dogs; Effect on Caregiver-Reported Problem Behaviours”
- Science: “Brain scans show dogs learn when sleeping—just like people”
- Scientific Reports: “Potential interactive effect of positive expectancy violation and sleep on memory consolidation in dogs”
- Animals: “Family Dogs’ Sleep Macrostructure Reflects Worsened Sleep Quality When Sleeping in the Absence of Their Owners: A Non-Invasive Polysomnography Study”
The post Attention, Annoying Humans: You Might Be Interrupting Your Dog’s Sleep, According to a New Study appeared first on Reader's Digest.
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