Ava Williams
There are dog owners who are reluctant to let their pet sleep in their bedrooms. Because the four-legged friends could disturb sleep, so the widespread concern. However, sleep physicians at the US Mayo Sleep Clinic in Arizona came to a fundamentally different conclusion in a study: According to this, the presence of a dog in the bedroom can even have a positive effect on the sleep of the owner.
“Most people assume that pets are a source of disturbance in the bedroom,” says sleep medicine specialist and study leader Dr. Lois Krahn. “However, we found that many people feel safe and secure when they sleep in the same room with their animals,” she says in her study. “That, in turn, promotes sleep.”
Krahn and her colleagues studied the sleep of 40 healthy adults without insomnia and their dogs over five months. For a week, the test subjects wore special sensors that the researchers used to monitor their sleep intensity. In this way, the scientists found that some people sleep better when their dog is in the same room than when the animal sleeps somewhere else. The findings were published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
In the same room yes, in the same bed no
If the dog crawls into bed, however, the peace is over. According to the study, cuddling with animals in a bed at night is at the expense of sleep quality. Regardless, Krahn is very positive about the results of her study: “Today, many pet owners are away from their pets for most of the day, so they want to maximize their time with them when they are at home. Having them in the bedroom at night is an easy way to do that. Now pet owners can rest easy knowing it won’t negatively affect their sleep.”