Do you ban your dog from the bed in the hopes of getting a
better night's sleep?
It may be time to beg your pooch's forgiveness and hope
he'll join you at bedtime, after all.
A recent study finds that sleeping with pets actually helps some people sleep better because
it gives them a sense of security — and despite what sleep experts have said
for years, pets don't really disrupt our sleep.
"I'm not sure that there's a hard and fast rule about
pets [in bed]. My community of colleagues do think that it is just always a
risk," says Dr. Lois Krahn, a sleep medicine specialist at Mayo Clinic
Center for Sleep Medicine in Arizona, and one of the paper's authors
The study's findings are good news for many. Half of
American households own pets and half of those pets sleep either right in the
bed with us or somewhere in the bedroom.
To conduct the study, Krahn asked 150 respondents fill out
a sleep questionnaire that included questions about their companion animals. It
asked for details about the type and number of animals in the home as well as
what their sleeping habits were. During a subsequent interview, respondents
were asked where the pets slept, how the pets behaved, and whether or not pets
affected their own sleep.
FOLLOW US!
