The secret to a good nights rest? Let sleeping dogs lie ... next to you

There’s no feeling in the world like cuddling up at night with your pooch, even when we think they’re messing up our sleep by hogging space, stealing covers and yapping at random sounds.A surprising new study found that people who sleep near their dogs don’t experience disrupted sleep.

If anything, the University of Toronto researchers discovered, we humans are the ones disturbing our dogs’ sleep.And we feel safer sleeping with our dogs, hinting at “a deeper evolutionary history” between humans and dogs, said study co-author Ming Fei Li, who was a graduate student of evolutionary anthropology during the research.Activity trackers similar to Fitbits monitored the nighttime activity of 25 human volunteers and their 38 dogs in southern Ontario to monitor how each affected the other’s sleep.

The study, which was published Wednesday in PLOS One, was conducted during the Covid pandemic as part of a larger project comparing the activity patterns of socialized wolves and domestic dogs.For four weeks, the humans wore the devices on their wrists while the dogs, all huskies and malamutes with no health problems, wore them on their collars.Most dogs slept on the bed or in the same room as their humans.

A few dogs slept in different rooms, said anthropology researcher Lavania Nagendran, who was also a study author.Using the activity trackers, they analyzed “objective sleep measures” of the people and their dogs, including sleep duration and sleep quality, Nagendran said.The human volunteers also self-reported their sleep quality in an accompanying survey.Though half of the people, particularly those who slept with more than one dog at a time, reported interrupted sleep, the activity tracker data found that sharing a bed with their dogs didn’t affect how well or how long the pups or their humans slept.“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,” Nagen...