Welcome to the little-discussed world of adult sleeping arrangements, where many couples secretly don't sleep next to each other. We don't talk about it much because those who do sleep next to each other think that our relationships must be horribly broken, and we don't feel the need to justify our choices, or get into details of the logistics of our intimate lives. But talked about or not, it is true -- many more couples than you might think choose sleep separately for exactly the reasons shown by this data. A good night's sleep is more important in the long run than physical proximity to your partner.
many more couples than you might think choose sleep separately for exactly the reasons shown by this data.
It appears you didn't read past the first graph (which initially implies a reduction in sleep due to sharing a bed with his partner). But he then goes on to say this:
Turns out, since we started sharing a bed, most nights I have the same amount of sleep as before.
What follows is a further analysis leading to this conclusion:
Whilst spending nights with my girlfriend results in less time in a state which Fitbit recognises as “lying in bed ready to sleep”, because we go to bed later and get up earlier, when I am in that state, I sleep better.
So it's not that he's sleeping less, or more poorly while sharing a bed. That first graph is just a product of less time spent physically in bed. In fact, there's another graph he presents that shows basically the same amount of actual sleep while in bed, with or without his partner.
Try not to read your own biases into other people's writing, and be very careful when skimming. It's a hard habit to break, I know, but it can really hurt you in life (no joke... misreading an email in a professional context can make for nasty mistakes).
Anecdotes are not data and all that aside - your partner's movements are often something that can be gotten used to. As half of a happily "sleeping in the same bed" couple for around 22 years now, the only time my wife affects my sleep is when she isn't well; a time I don't mind being woken up.
It's amazing what humans can get used to. We recently got a puppy, and went from "wake up every time it moves" to "wake up only if it starts whining". Didn't even take 3 months.
We have a 15 month old daughter who sleeps in a crib in our room, and my wife is a light sleeper. Baby makes a noise, wife wakes up, wife takes an hour to fall back asleep.
I keep telling her: please, sleep on the couch. Literally every time you sleep out there, you get better sleep, and feel better in the morning. But she always says no.
I wish we were one of those couples who secretly, or otherwise, slept apart at least a few nights a week.
I've thought about it, but that also means that we have to retreat to the bedroom when the kid goes to sleep (7:30), and can't walk through the living room to the bathroom, kitchen, etc. until she's very deeply asleep - and even then, it might wake her up.
Hm. Some kids sleep really deep and would be fine in that situation, the best way to figure it out is to try it and to give it enough time that you know that if there is a problem it is structural and not just the adaptation period.
My eldest slept so solid that you could have fired a cannon next to him and he would have slept through it (and still does, only he's a bit large to sleep in a crib now...).
The most important factor is something to create a shade around the crib so it isn't bathed in light or receives reflected intensity changes from a tv or so.
I wouldn't call ours a light sleeper, but she definitely starts to stir if someone walks on the slightly-creaky parts of the floor next to her. She'll often stir a bit even if we're just going to bed, and she's woken up on occasion.
She doesn't wake up from the TV-sounds-through-an-ajar-door, but being in the same room would definitely wake her up, to say nothing of falling asleep with that sort of stimulation.
A good part of that is likely something that you can get used to, but the important factor is if your little one will get enough rest. That's something you'll know soon enough. Anyway, much good luck to you with this, you have nothing to lose by trying and if it does not work you can always simply switch back to the present situation.
For what it's worth, from a father of three... my ex coddled the kids in this regard. She _demanded_ absolute silence when they went to sleep. The problem is, that _trains_ the kids to need absolute silence, rather than getting accustomed to hearing the occasional sound and putting themselves back to sleep. The best things you can do, for your own well-being and theirs, is let them cry it out a bit and go about your normal routine.
I must admit we have a divide like that too. My wife will stir at the slightest noise, whereas I assume that a murmer or two is just a random noise and safe to ignore.
Obviously if the baby is crying heartily either of us will investigate, but I don't feel the need (most of the time) to check on him if there are sporadic gurgles, laughs, or "noise".
That said I think my wife is coming round, she's started sleeping with earplugs now so that she doesn't wake up unless there is a real "emergency".
(I wonder if you're getting downvoted for mentioning "cry it out"; the only thing more controversial in parenting is circumcision.)
Yup. We live in New York. There's no such thing as absolute silence here, and she can still hear things from the living room. We're definitely not requiring silence :P
I was having issues with my kid getting to sleep through the night. It turns out that we needed some warmer pajamas and to make the baby drink as much milk as possible. After that, glorious sleep-filled nights were to be had from then on. I wish I had realized that months earlier.
We had the opposite problem awhile ago; we had a hot week or so in the city, and hadn't put in the AC yet - the kid kept waking up, and at one point when I went to check on her, I found her having unzipped her pajamas down to her waist and wriggled her arms out of the top part.
Making sure they're well fed is definitely a good idea; my wife was worried that she'd over-associate sleep with eating, and wouldn't sleep without eating first... but I never really saw this as a big problem. She's a baby; let her eat before bed.
But all kids are weird and different - some kids have reflux, and feeding them shortly before going to bed is going to keep them awake. Some get gassy. Some just don't like sleeping with a full stomach. That's probably the worst thing about being a new parent - you can read and listen to all the advice you want, but then you gotta figure out what actually works with yours and what doesn't.
Sleeping with a partner, I discovered I have pretty severe OSA (obstructive sleep apnea). I was wondering why I was tired all the time for 5+ years, and here was the answer.
I got CPAP therapy going (funny machine that fixes your breathing). Not super sexy but after a few weeks of using it every night I am orders of magnitude better. Better moods, more energy, I wake up rested and I don't need 10 hours of sleep to feel normal. I used to spend most of my weekends catching up on sleep, little did I know I was not really sleeping well at all.
With the CPAP therapy I don't move at all during the night according to my partner.
Now all we need to do is get the cat to stop waking us up and her kid to sleep in his own bed :)
What about a king size bed? With dual twin size coverings? I'm not judging - but sleeping in the other room or on the other bed seems to defeat the point of being together, no?
I was married for a long while - and I miss it. That said - she only weighed 95 pounds, so maybe not having to deal with king-kong in my bed helped.
> sleeping in the other room or on the other bed seems to defeat the point of being together, no?
I think that sleeping together (in the literal, dictionary sense) is the least together-thing you're doing as a couple, because you're literally not even aware of the time.
As someone who has only recently broken up from an intense 10+ year relationship I can assure you it's not. From the moment we got to bed to the instant one of us sort of woke-up-but-not-quite and subconsciously reached for the other, the mere presence of each one's SO was incredibly soothing. This was an incredibly privileged moment that I cherished for all of those years, that is made all too painful now by it's sorely missed absence•. Sure sometimes one of us would wake up at night and inconvenience the other (and a pillow or three was definitely thrown, as well as one of us occasionally going to read a book and maybe crash too in the sofa on a sleepless night, and more often than not we would regularly wake up to the absence of the other some time later, and get out of bed to check out if everything was fine) but the togetherness was real.
While I perfectly understand that each couple finds it's own way, subsuming being asleep to be like some sort of deep, nightlong, perceptionless coma is just incorrect.
Maybe so. But, for me, subliminally - it feels when I wake up that there is a felt difference from having spent the night alone or not. But, again, maybe that's just me.
Makes sense. I (we) had that when we first moved to the US, and were not spending the night in adjacent futons. We got a bigger bed - and it helped. But I can see how that would work or not depending on...
hahaha, my investment in a king-sized bed has not increased the amount of space I have in bed since we shared a queen, but let me tell you, my wife has ALL THE ROOM IN THE WORLD! And she's only a hair over the size of your ex.
One thing I've realized, though, is it doesn't make a big difference to me. We're both fairly deep sleepers though occasionally my snoring wakes her and she nudges me and I roll over. We also have a couple of cats on the bed, and when they were kittens I'd sometimes wake up and yell at them for scratching elsewhere in the house.
What I've realized is, despite waking up more often, I'm not significantly less well-rested. I only seem to wake to a cat pawing my scalp or my wife rolling over when I'm already in very light sleep anyway, so it's no problem.
Ha! I have a friend that at 5am, his cat will walk up on his chest and tap his left eyelid with an extended index claw. Tap tap tap. Smart critters. They freak me out.
You've not shared a bed with someone that wakes you. I'm that person.
I snore. It wakes my spouse up at night, which causes him to wake me up... sort of. I'm not always conscious of him waking me, but I will temporarily roll over. I sleep pretty heavily (and always have), so waking me is difficult. I sleep more poorly when we share a bed, and he most definitely does.
The best solution we've found is one of us going into another room. Earplugs help little: He still needs to hear the alarm. I cannot be trusted to wake to them with regularity (living on my own, I'm occasionally late to work if I work early). They have vibrating alarms for the hard of hearing that might work out, but I have not tried.
We still have cuddle time if we should choose it and still do normal "bed" activities. If we both sleep well, we are both happier during the day. The payoff is definitely worth it. We occasionally sleep in the same room if he sleeps earlier than me, using our own blankets (common here in Norway). Which again, defeats the point for some folks but is really great because we both stay at a more optimal temperature, keeping us sleeping better than sharing.
If you snore that badly, consider visiting a respiratory and sleep specialist to test for sleep apnea. That level of snoring is not normal - you should not be waking people with your snoring and if you are tired in the morning and being late for work, that's an indication it is negatively affecting your life (and that of others too).
Been there. Done that.
After a sleep study, I started using a CPAP machine and it totally turned my sleep and life around.
I've considered going to the doctor for the snoring. I generally wake well-rested so long as I sleep 7-8 hours.
For me, the sleep thing is something I've had since I was a child and isn't connected to the snoring. I have a later body clock than most folks. I was the child that refused to wake to open christmas presents and i've always slept soundly like this. My poor mother had to fight with me through school. I sometimes simply don't hear alarm clocks, unfortunately - which nearly disappears if I wake at 9-10.
I'm that person in our marriage. I have noticed that my snoring is really bad when I'm exhausted by life (kids aren't letting us sleep, stressed out, etc). We have an arrangement where my wife kicks me out if she can't sleep and I spend the night on the couch. By definition, if I'm so tired that I'm snoring like that, sleeping on the couch is no big deal.
As far as vibrating alarms go: I use my Apple Watch as my alarm. It's set to silent, so it just vibrates when it's time for me to wake up. For the most part, my wife is never aware of it going off. It's been a total game changer for me.
My wife and I went to a mattress store and tested out every mattress. One of us would close our eyes while the other got on the mattress and rolled over. When we couldn't tell when the other was moving we had our mattress.
It ended up costing like $3000, but if you can afford it I think that's a small price for something both of you will use literally ~30% of every day.
My wife and I came to the realization that the Europeans are onto something with the twin size duvets on full size beds after visiting last summer. Fortunately, neither of us snores much but she prefers to sleep with far less covers than I do. What used to be a constant battle of covers being tossed aside only to fail at reclaiming them later in the night now allows each of us to determine our own sleep temperature much more easily and with far less disruption to the other.
Not just sleep temp (wife is also of the less covers camp), but mattress firmness. My wife likes ultra firm by European standards. So she has the Chinese sea horse brand mattress. I'm a bag of bones, so the mattress literally pushes my spine to pinch nerves. Our solution is a king size mattress with twin covers, and one side has a twin memory foam. We sleep happy and together.
Cultural aside: mattress firmness. It will blow your mind how firm some seahorse mattresses get. One Caucasian friend commented after one night that they would have probably been better off probably on our broadloom carpet floor.
OT, but I'm now super conflicted about whether the correct quantifier for covers is "less" or "fewer". I think I agree with you that "less" is more correct, but my inner pedantry can't shake the feeling that it sounds weird.
I'm 31 and I've never had a partner, but every time I've had sex, the experience of sleep (or lack thereof) that follows fills me with dread concerning what life will be like in a relationship.
Same age, everyone is different, but my experience is at least in your 20s when you're getting your first tastes of cohabitating relationships:
1) Starting cohabitating relationship: First a transition period where you lose sleep, but then you sleep like a baby, you don't stay up late thinking or worrying about x,y,z. The downside is you find yourself in a stagnating ball of comfort and end up challenging yourself a lot less because you're just too comfortable. (I look back at how lame I became in some of my cohabitating relationships, and could say the same for others I know, but would not to their face.)
b) Leaving cohabitating relationship: You sleep like a baby at first (nice surface feeling of independence), maybe for a couple months even, but then you grow anxious and feel negative effects of dependency withdrawal, and then end up losing a lot more sleep staying up late thinking or working. That can last a while, until you find another cohabitating relationship or find a deep rooted sense of independence again.
Again, likely different when you're older, but I think that's the general trajectory of being in cohabitating relationships in your younger years.
If you want a relationship (and it sounds like you do) then you'd better take a deep breath and jump into one, because live-in relationships are psychically demanding and complex, and it takes significant time to learn how to do it - not least because it's hard to fully know yourself until you develop the ability to see yourself through the eyes of others. And I don't mean in little glimpses, but in the sense of giving someone time to fully know about you, including the parts of yourself you'd rather keep hidden, the compromises you make (or demand) when your interests are misaligned but you're tethered to each other, and so forth.
I don't want to go into specifics as it's not a competition, but I've been sexually active nearly as long as you've been alive, and spent about 2/3 of that in relationships of various depth and complexity in addition to more casual flings. I'd say it's only around this stage of mid-life that I've developed a high degree of self-knowledge, even though I've been introverted as long as I can remember.
Relationships are hard work, and you won't just lose sleep, you'll get your heart broken over and over. But loneliness and isolation are terribly, terribly corrosive, and I would say that to hold back from fully engaging with life is to literally waste your time. The value of being in love, loving others, and allowing them to love you are beyond price and enable you to overcome any level of fear. If there is a 'point' to consciousness, it is to fully experience this.
You could die tomorrow, so I beg you from the bottom of my heart to start living today.
Towards the top of my 'advice to the young' list, is to obtain a king-sized bed as soon as possible after leaving home. (In AU these are around 2030x1900mm - though there are regional variances with the same appellation).
Partly so you don't end up with a collection of incompatible sheeting as you slowly trade up bed sizes for the first few years of living away from home, but also because it makes it more likely that your sleep (arriving, leaving, and the bit in the between) patterns are much less likely to disrupt your partner.
In terms of sleep disruption, yes. But not necessarily in terms of disruption in your bed. Even though it's all the rage, you don't have to co-sleep. We didn't, and our daughter slept through the night once she was 5 months and has always been an amazing sleeper (12 hours per night like clockwork).
This. We moved all of our babies into separate rooms ASAP because hearing all of their sleep noises was killing our ability to sleep. Major win for us.
I've got a friend with a four year old who wakes up every 45-60 minutes. Nightmare.
Happily our 5-month-old only wakes up a couple of times in the night, and has always been a good sleeper. I'm hoping that once he starts eating more solid foods he'll be able to sleep through the night in the next month or two, but even if he doesn't I'm still very definitely counting our blessings!
I still wonder how anybody could voluntarily opt for a second one.
Thank God for the hardwired unconditional love for one's own children (I have heard that occasionally it doesn't work — poor souls). And still, I never even remotely expected anything like what has happened.
> I still wonder how anybody could voluntarily opt for a second one.
We're opting out of that. I have no idea how people do it, especially with another small child in the house. (We also live far from family, in a one-bedroom apartment - when someone wakes up in our home, there's a 50% chance that everyone wakes up in our home.)
I know a couple who had their second kid while they had a small child already. They share the same feeling about it being very hard. But, their reasoning had something to do with how they grew up and how their kids would.
Both of them had siblings growing up, and by the time they had their first kid, they had this good family support system - parents (grand parents to the kid), siblings (aunts/uncles to the kid). Even after their parents are gone, there still are their siblings (their spouses and kids) that still are part of that family support system, an immediate family that you can trust and rely on (at least in most families, I guess).
They were worried that for their kid when he/she grows up, after they are gone, there would be no immediate family left at all. No siblings, so no aunts or uncles or cousins. This is made worse because the age when they had their first kid was almost a decade later compared to when their parents had their first kid. And, it doesn't help either that families are more spread now with people moving to different parts of the world for opportunities and careers than it was a generation ago.
It's really hard. Our second came while the first was still under 2 years old. Like you, we live far from family. We were fortunate enough to be in a multi-bedroom house, though. Still, our marriage almost fell apart.
Maybe just space them out? We had 2.5 years between the 2nd and 3rd and those extra 8 months made a world of difference. Not sure how old yours is now, but the difficulty of raising kids is an exponential backoff kind of a thing. Our oldest is 4.5 and, honestly, hardly requires any work. We basically just make her meals, but we could probably even teach her how to do that...
He tells me that it eventually gets easier, as they get old enough to help take care of the young ones. I assume it's similar to how you learn to echolocate if someone stabs your eyes out, or how you learn to pick things up with your feet if someone eats your hands.
I've got one child, and I while I could have another I think two would be my limit. Having two screaming children seems like it would be stressful enough, I can't imagine having more than three!
Pretty cool to have data on this. My more recent long-term relationships have involved actually sleeping in separate beds 99% of the time, which I'm quite happy with.
Maybe it works for some couples, but it seems like a tradition borne of history and culture and limited living space. Much prefer having my own room.
I really like sleeping with my wife, and with the kids when camping or when we have guests over. However, I miss having a proper space to call my own when I'm awake.
Homes have gotten much larger as humans have become more wealthy on average. Compare the 1500 sq ft 1950s suburban home to today's 3000+ sq ft McMansions.
I used to think it was weird that if I fell asleep without my girlfriend in the bed I saw a correlation to the number of times I woke up / quality of my sleep. We broke up two weeks ago and sleeping has certainly been the most difficult adjustment. Also why Quantum Biology is interesting as it paints a subconscious non-sensory human connection. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADiql3FG5is&t=388s / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8weQFmQYxL8
They're not useless when you don't have time to program your own CMS. Wordpress is good for blogs. It takes no time to set up, is crazy customizable and widely supported. Writing your own solution in whatever nodejs-react wonderland would take much more time than is necessary.
Honest question, most of the plots I see on r/dataisbeautiful or other pop data science sources would get me heckled at a group meeting. Does this mean a) my group is exceptionally harshly pushing for clarity and precision and life will be "easier" in the real world or does it mean a good chunk of statisticians in the field do poor work?
I think a good chunk of the OC on /r/dataisbeautiful is not done by statisticians. Honestly at this point in the game, a tiny part of me gets annoyed any time I see ANY data without some indicator of variance.
Anyone recall that back in 2011, the default setting for your Fitbit data was public and it was set to be indexed by Google, leading to some rather embarrassing search results.
Or correlation with basically everything else. I sleep better when in a separate room than my wife, because if that happens that's probably because she was being nice and shielded me from my morning duties, and let the kid jump in her bed in the morning.
In order for those measure to make any sense OP would need to follow the exact same routine with and without his girlfriend (in the same flat of course). Otherwise it is measuring the general effect of living with somebody (different activities, different morning arrangement, different commute, ...) rather than the specific sleeping arrangement effect.
Now I'm not discarding the effect, however after a few years together, you start getting used to your bed partner. The stuff that really matters is if you have enough room and sheets to make it work. In the extreme case, a queen size bed is basically 2 single bed joined together and is a cheaper alternative than the extra half a million an extra bedroom costs.
edit: reread the article and it seems OP actually talk more about the effect of living with somebody rather than the physical sleeping arrangement. Comments were drifting in the "physical" direction at the time I commented.
I definitively share the same experience - obviously with a kid and wife, I have much less freedom in my night and morning routine. Not sure I'm sleeping better, my wife definitively is - her stress level is way lower when she knows I'm home and she sleeps more deeply, not woken up by every little noise (the effect has been mitigated slightly since we have a child though)
I think the interesting part is as the relationship matures, there is no emotional pull down in not sleeping close to each other and couple happily sleep a little far but on the same bed.
Earplugs have been a game changer for me in this department. As an extremely light sleeper I've been struggling all my life with other people snoring or even semi-loud breathing.
After I started using earplugs I'm now sleeping through the night even better than when I slept by myself. I feel like when I wear them I'm in an isolation chamber :)
The trick was finding earplugs that don't hurt after wearing them for 8 hours, but after having tried a few I landed on some acceptable ones (I can still feel them but they're not uncomfortable if inserted properly)
There are probably better ones out there but these work fine for me. I also like that they don't cover the louder noises (I also hear the alarm clock), but if you're dealing with a heavy snorer they might not do the trick
PS: with these the trick is in how you insert them in the year: not too little (they'll slip off during sleep) and not too much (your ears will hurt in the morning). As per their instructions, you roll them between your fingers a little and then pull on your ear lobe before gently inserting them
Mostly it's just a matter of getting used to it… when I first moved in with a long-term girlfriend, I didn't sleep well sharing the bed. But I quickly got used to it and it became a non-issue within months. years later, we broke up and I went back to sleeping alone… These days I frequently share a bed with various people and it's a non-issue; I sleep perfectly regardless of anyone else being in the bed.
I'm interested. You've mentioned when you got the Fitbit, but haven't mentioned how long have you been sleeping together. Considering that you have recorded ~13 months in total, is the amount of data you have approximately the same or is the amount of data tilted on one of the sides in any way?
If she sees this your problem may well fix itself :)
I do agree about the merits of a large bed though. With a wife and two huge dogs things get a little crowded but since I've been an insomniac since childhood this is merely a new version of an old problem.
I have a different experience, viz. that sharing a bed reduces the jitter in my sleeping patterns, with long-term benefits perceived in cognition, mood, and self-care. It'd be interesting to make a proper data analysis.
It's a problem of upbringing. If you as a child learnt to sleep alone early you will have a problem sharing a bed. Case in point: My Asian wife sleeps happily with our children all over her. It's amazing.
When you stay up late, does your girlfriend also stay up? If it were me, I would stay up after she went asleep just so I could get some alone time. Maybe it's the same for you.
