My dog sleeps at the foot of the bed, and about twice a night he gets up, turns three full circles, sighs like a man who’s been asked to work a double, and lies back down in the exact same spot.
I know this because I’m awake for it. Every time.
And yet if you asked me whether I sleep better with him there, I’d say yes without thinking. So would most of the people I know who let the dog into bed. We’ll admit he takes up half the mattress, we’ll admit he snores, and then we’ll tell you we can’t sleep right when he’s not there.
That’s a strange thing to say about something that keeps waking you up. It’s a bit like the way people who leave the TV on for the dog know it’s slightly irrational and do it anyway, because the relationship runs on something other than logic.
It turns out the research has been circling this exact contradiction for about a decade, and it’s landed somewhere more interesting than “dogs are good for sleep” or “dogs are bad for sleep.”
The sleep trackers say the dog costs you something
Start with the studies that actually strapped devices to people.
In 2017, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona put motion sensors on 40 healthy adults and their dogs for a week and measured sleep efficiency, which is the share of time in bed you spend actually asleep. Anything over 80 percent is considered fine.
People with a dog in the bedroom averaged 81 percent. People with the dog on the bed itself came in a bit lower, and the researchers called that a real if modest drop.
The Mayo Clinic Proceedings study was small, mostly women, and only covered one week, but it was the first time anyone had objectively measured what a dog does to a human’s night.
Then in 2024, a much bigger study tried to settle the question with numbers. Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 American adults, close to half of whom slept in the same room as a pet. The pet co-sleepers reported worse sleep quality and more insomnia symptoms, and the effect was driven by dogs rather than cats.
That Scientific Reports paper was survey-based, so it can’t prove the dog caused the bad sleep, and it also found that how bonded people were to their pets made no difference to the result. But it’s the largest data set we have, and it doesn’t flatter the dog.
The people in those same studies keep saying they sleep fine
Here’s where it gets strange.
Two small actigraphy studies, one in Australia and one in the US, tracked dogs’ and owners’ movements through the night and found the same thing. When the dog moved, the person moved. The dog’s restless stretches lined up with the human’s.
And when the researchers asked those same owners how they’d slept, they said well. A 2021 review in Sleep Health noted that the mismatch between what the devices recorded and what people reported looks almost identical to what happens when two humans share a bed: more movement on the monitor, more satisfaction in the morning.
The 2024 survey found the same gap from a different angle. Even in a sample where pet co-sleepers reported more insomnia symptoms, 93 percent of them said their pet had a positive or neutral effect on their sleep.
You can read that as people being oblivious. The researchers gently suggested as much. But there’s another reading, which is that the trackers and the people are measuring two different things, and the people are accurate about the one they’re measuring.
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What the dog reliably delivers is a feeling of security
Across all of these studies, one result shows up every time it’s measured: how safe people feel with the dog there.
In 2018, Christy Hoffman, an animal behavior researcher at Canisius College, surveyed 962 women about who shared their bed. More than half slept with at least one dog. When Hoffman asked them to rate their bed partners on two things, disturbance and comfort-and-security, the dogs came out ahead of both cats and humans.
Women rated dogs as less disruptive than a human partner. Cats, for the record, were rated as disruptive as a human and less comforting than either.
“Dogs as bed partners scored higher on comfort and security than did human and feline partners,” Hoffman said in the university’s write-up.
That’s a survey of women who chose to answer a survey about their pets, so treat it as one data point rather than a verdict. But the comfort-and-security result has never really been contradicted. Nobody has found a group of dog co-sleepers who feel less safe with the dog there. The sleep-quality findings bounce around. The felt-security finding stays put.
Sleeping next to a dog activates the same system as sleeping next to a person
Psychologists have a name for what the dog is doing. It’s called being an attachment figure.
The original theory came from studying infants and mothers, but researchers have spent years showing that adults extend the same machinery to romantic partners, close friends, and, it turns out, pets. In 2012, Sigal Zilcha-Mano, Mario Mikulincer, and Phillip Shaver ran two experiments testing whether a pet could function as a safe haven and a secure base, which are the two jobs an attachment figure does.
Owners doing a stressful task showed smaller blood pressure spikes when their pet was in the room, or even just when they were asked to think about their pet. The Journal of Research in Personality paper concluded that pets can provide the same distress-buffering that human attachment figures do.
Now think about what sleep actually requires. You have to let your guard down for seven or eight hours in the dark. Every part of the nervous system that evolved to keep you alive has to agree to stand down.
Wendy Troxel, a sleep scientist at RAND who has spent her career studying couples in bed, describes the same tradeoff in humans. Objectively, people sleep slightly worse next to a partner. Subjectively, most say they sleep better, and Troxel told Today that’s because of the sense of safety and comfort a bed partner provides.
The dog at the foot of the bed is doing the same job. A warm, breathing body that will notice a noise before you do. Something in the room that would react if anything were wrong. For a brain deciding whether it’s safe to switch off, that carries real weight.
The security usually wins because it decides whether you fall asleep at all
Now the part I think the sleep-tracker studies miss, and it’s why the headline says “for most people.”
Actigraphy measures what happens once you’re asleep: how much you move, how often you surface, what share of the night you’re actually out. It’s very good at catching the 2 a.m. circling ritual.
What it’s worse at capturing is the twenty minutes before that, when you’re lying there deciding whether the day is finished. That’s the window where felt security does its work. It’s the difference between lying in the dark listening for sounds and lying in the dark not listening for anything.
If the dog buys you an easier drop into sleep and a nervous system that isn’t half-braced all night, then losing a few percentage points of efficiency to his repositioning might be a trade that nets out in your favor. The devices record the cost. They don’t record the reason you paid it.
I want to be honest that no study has directly tested this tradeoff. It’s an inference from two consistent findings that seem to point in opposite directions until you notice they’re measuring different parts of the night.
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There are people for whom the tradeoff goes the other way
Let’s be clear about who “most people” leaves out.
If you have an actual sleep disorder, a very large or very restless dog, several dogs, or allergies, the objective costs can get big enough to swamp the psychological benefit. The Mayo researchers specifically flagged multiple pets as a risk. The 2024 survey found the negative effect got stronger with each additional animal.
And if you’re someone who genuinely doesn’t feel safer with the dog there, who finds the warmth annoying and the movement irritating and gets nothing back for it, then there’s no security dividend to offset the cost. You’d probably sleep better with the door closed, and you shouldn’t let anyone’s cozy Instagram reel talk you out of that.
The real test is the one Troxel gives couples: if you sleep better apart, sleep apart. If you can’t tell the difference, and the closeness matters to you, keep the arrangement.
Which is roughly where I’ve landed. My dog is going to turn his three circles tonight, and I’m going to wake up for it, and I’m going to fall back asleep faster than I would if the room were empty.
The trackers would call that a wash. It doesn’t feel like one.
