#Should i sleep with my dog full#

“We actually have to lift them onto the bed. “They’re getting older, so they can’t leap up onto the bed anymore,” she said. Horowitz said that when her dogs, Finnegan, a lab mix, and Upton, a Great Dane-bloodhound mix, started crowding the bed, the solution in her house was not to kick them out, but to “expand the size of our bed.” It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.”ĭr.

#Should i sleep with my dog full#

“For some reason, there is this sense that we have to maintain our dominance over them by having full possession of these things. “I think it really came from this idea that dogs should be segregated from the best parts of the house - they shouldn’t be in the kitchen, the dining room, on the couch or on the bed,” Dr. “It would be extra hard not to let them.”

“If you let them sleep on the bed with you, they’re going to continue to want to because it’s a nice place to sleep,” Dr. Once a dog experiences sleeping in bed with a human, it can be a hard habit to break, said Alexandra Horowitz, a professor at Barnard College and author of the book, “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” The study’s authors noted that the dog’s sleep efficiency “was unaffected by their location.” And notably, the monitoring devices detected the dogs enjoying about two minutes of playtime each night.

Although the difference was statistically meaningful, it translates to roughly 14 minutes of lost sleep for people who sleep with their dog compared with those who had their dog in the same room. If a dog was sleeping on the bed, sleep efficiency dropped to about 80 percent, which is less than ideal but not bad either. In the Mayo study, the sleep efficiency of people whose dogs slept in the room was close to that, at about 83 percent. Ideally, you’ll stay asleep about 85 percent of the time you’re in bed. Everyone has brief periods where they wake during the night, but they often don’t even notice.