How Sharing a Bed Changed My Sleep
thedurkweb.com
thedurkweb.com
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
• God I miss those night kicks.
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.
But, I hear you.
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.
Been there. Done that.
After a sleep study, I started using a CPAP machine and it totally turned my sleep and life around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
8-O
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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...
I too was unprepared for the level of hell a child brings. But, unconditional love and all that jazz.
For sure though, one is enough for one lifetime. My cousin is on his fourth; no idea why he hates himself so much.
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.
* My mom has 11 siblings.
* My dad has 6.
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!
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.
Working article link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yrb4OPB...
> Error establishing a database connection
Does someone have an archive link? (Or an explanation why rendering this article requires a database connection, for that matter.)
A good alternative would be to use github pages.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/sexual-activity-tracked-by...
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)
"But honey, it's for science! Don't you want to make the world a better place!?"
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.
We also took out "with my girlfriend", a form of bait in its own right, since the substance of the title remains the same without it.
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
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.
Advice: set up cloudflare for caching / cdn, it is free.
Oh, PHP and MySQL.