Duvet hogging can take its toll on a relationship – and your night’s sleep, but you may not be aware of it come morning
Shutterstock/Vasylchenko Nikita
Sleeping with a partner leads to more overnight wake-ups than sleeping alone. Often, these disturbances are brief and forgotten by morning, but there are strategies to address them if they become problematic.
“Research finds that subjectively, people think they sleep better together than when they sleep apart, but when you objectively measure it, there’s more sleep disruption when they sleep together,” says Sean Drummond at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
To explore the effects of bed-sharing on couples’ sleep, Lionel Rayward at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues conducted a systematic review of the existing research. All the studies they reviewed found evidence of partner disturbance while co-sleeping, with 30 to 46 per cent of couples’ movements being shared. In other words, when one person tugged at the covers, rolled over, kicked out a leg or made other movements, their partner stirred too.
One study in a sleep lab, for example, recorded an average of 51 leg movements per night in individuals when they slept alone but 62 when they slept with their partner. This translated to two extra awakenings per night, as determined by scalp electrodes monitoring the individuals’ electrical brain activity.
The review also included a study by Drummond’s team that asked couples to wear movement-detecting smartwatches while they slept in their shared bed at home. On average, the participants were woken six times per night by their partner’s movements. However, they only remembered one of these, on average, the next day, suggesting that most partner disturbances are minor and have minimal effect on overall sleep quality, says Drummond. “When both partners are healthy sleepers, these wake-ups probably aren’t a big deal, they just roll over and fall back asleep,” he says.
Major sleep disturbances are more likely to emerge when one partner snores or has insomnia, the latest review finds. “A person with insomnia is more likely to toss and turn, or even if they’re lying there trying to be quiet, it’s hard for them to be perfectly still while they’re awake, so there’s more activity and more likelihood of disturbing their partner,” says Drummond.
These issues can sometimes lead to “sleep divorce”, where partners sleep in separate beds or rooms to avoid disturbing each other. “There’s nothing inherently unhealthy about sleeping apart, but some couples see it as a defeat to their relationship, and personally, I think it’s a far better idea to try to fix the actual sleep problem,” says Drummond.
If one member of the couple has insomnia, for example, Drummond and his team have found that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be beneficial, particularly when partners attend the sessions together. After treatment, both partners tend to sleep better, he says.
When blanket-hogging or different temperature preferences are the problem, Rayward and his colleagues recommend trying the “Scandinavian method”, which involves sharing the same bed but using separate blankets.
Snoring treatments include continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines that keep people’s airways open and “mandibular advancement devices”, mouthguard-like devices made by dentists that pull the lower jaw forward. “This moves the tongue forward and creates more space at the back of the throat so it’s easier to breathe in and out and reduces snoring,” says Amal Osman at Flinders University in Australia. Some people snore only while lying on their backs, which can sometimes be addressed by wearing a backpack to bed to encourage side-sleeping, says Osman.
About 80 to 90 per cent of couples in the UK and US sleep in the same bed, compared with 63 per cent in Japan, where mothers often co-sleep with children in one room while fathers sleep in another.
Communal sleeping is thought to have been the most common sleeping arrangement across human history because it affords warmth and a sense of security. Some of the oldest mattresses ever found – including 77,000-year-old plant mattresses discovered in South Africa – are big enough to accommodate whole families.
Pre-industrial societies also typically sleep communally. For instance, the Hadza people of Tanzania sleep side by side in family groups in small huts. Research has found that Hadza adults regularly wake up and about 40 per cent tend to be awake or lightly dozing at any given time overnight, perhaps to ensure someone is always listening out for danger. Despite these regular disturbances, however, they don’t report any problems with their sleep.
This suggests we shouldn’t worry too much about the odd sleep disruption from others, says Drummond. “The reality is, everybody wakes up a few times every night – nobody sleeps 100 per cent of the time.”
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