Sleeping alongside your dog probably doesn't disrupt your sleep as much as you might think, according to a study published October 7, 2026 in the open access journal PLOS One by Ming Fei Li of the University of Toronto, Canada, Lavania Nagendran of the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada, and colleagues.
It is intuitive to think that humans and their dogs affect each other's sleep schedules, but little research has been done in this area and with conflicting results. In this study, Li, Nagendran and colleagues examined the nighttime activity of 25 humans and their 38 dogs to investigate how they impacted each other's nighttime experience for better or worse.
Over a period of four weeks, results from activity monitors – worn on the wrist for humans and on the collar for dogs – found that sharing the bed with a dog did not significantly impact sleep duration or sleep quality, even in cases where owners reported feeling like their dogs were disturbing their sleep. Nighttime activity was strongly correlated, with humans and their dogs commonly becoming active around the same time in the night, but more often than not the humans began moving before the dogs did, suggesting that owners are disturbing their dog's sleep more than the other way around.
Thus, the answer to the question of "who is disturbing whom" seem to be a bit of both. These results align with some previous research on the benefits and drawbacks of co-sleeping with dogs, but the authors note that this study includes a limited sample and no dog-less control group. Therefore, future studies will be needed to include more data on dogs of different ages and breeds.
The authors add: "Our findings suggest that nighttime activity in humans and dogs is closely coupled and there may be discrepancies between objective and subjective sleep measures."
Author interview: https://plos.io/4yeDh7e
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4hIHnyG
Citation: Li MF, Nagendran L, Kiru C, Schroeder L, Samson DR (2026) Who is disrupting whom? Examining the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs. PLoS One 21(10): e0358453. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0358453
Author countries: USA, Canada.
Funding: This work was supported by Discovery Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2020-04159 to L. S. and RGPIN-2020-05942 to D. R. S.). URL: https://nserc-crsng.canada.ca/en/funding-opportunity/discovery-grants-individual-program . The funders did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
