People Who Sleep Near Their Dogs Don't Experience Disrupted Sleep, per NBC
The trackers cleared the dogs
"People who sleep near their dogs don't experience disrupted sleep," per NBC News, citing a new study from University of Toronto researchers published in PLOS One. The study, titled "Who is disrupting whom?", tracked 25 people and their 38 dogs over four weeks, with both species wearing activity trackers so the researchers could measure objective sleep data instead of relying on how rested people felt.
The finding cuts against the usual advice. Half of the owners in the study, particularly those who slept with more than one dog at a time, reported interrupted sleep in the accompanying survey. The tracker data told a different story: sharing a bed or a room with a dog had no significant effect on how long or how well either the humans or the dogs slept.
If anything, the humans are the problem
The twist is the direction of the disturbance. When one of the pair woke or moved in the night, the timing data showed the human moved first more often than the dog, meaning owners are at least as likely to be disrupting their dogs' sleep as the other way around. "When we looked at the subjective, or people's perceived, sleep, we saw that there were people who reported poor sleep if they had multiple dogs," study author Lavania Nagendran told NBC News. "But, again, that wasn't seen in the devices."
Co-author Ming Fei Li pointed to a possible benefit instead: people report feeling safer sleeping with a dog nearby, which may hint at "a deeper evolutionary history" between the two species, and dogs' fixed routines can act as a time cue that nudges owners toward a more consistent sleep schedule. Sleep medicine expert Christopher Winter, who was not involved in the study, told NBC that creating that kind of internal consistency around sleep habits may matter more than total hours slept.
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Options market and stocks to watch
There is no direct sleep-with-your-dog trade, but the study lands in the middle of a pet economy that keeps growing through every cycle, and the listed names that live off owners treating dogs as family are CHWY and WOOF, Petco's ticker. Pet services, from boarding to veterinary care, are tracked through names like IDXX, and consumer studies that normalize premium pet spending tend to show up in those names' services revenue first.
The catalyst calendar here is earnings, not headlines: watch CHWY and WOOF services and repeat-customer metrics on their next prints. Follow consumer and health research stories on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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