How sharing a bed changed my sleep (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How sharing a bed changed my sleep (2017)

thedurkweb.com

41 pointssdurx13 comments

I've found this problem to shift later on in a relationship, where sleep quality actually _goes down_ when sleeping apart. Doesn't matter if it's a hotel room while traveling for work, or having my own bed to myself while my partner is out of town: my mind just can't stop obsessing that I _should_ be getting better rest because I have the bed all to myself, and as a result get hardly any rest at all! Thanks, brain!

I found when my wife was in India for ~2 months I would stay up late watching YouTube videos / Netflix. In the evenings I found myself less sleepy in general. I also ate really bad food since cooking for one is miserable for me.

When I first started dating my now wife I slept better than I've ever slept before. All of my anxiety washed away and I felt incredibly content. Since then with buying a house, moving, job changes, owning cats, and a litany of other stressors, my sleep quality has substantially diminished. I don't attribute this to sharing a bed though. My wife rarely causes me to wake, neither of us really fidget in our sleep.

>When I first started dating my now wife I slept better than I've ever slept before. ... Since then with buying a house, moving, job changes, owning cats, and a litany of other stressors, my sleep quality has substantially diminished.

How could owning cats hurt your sleep quality? I have 3 of them and they're fine; they never bother me at night.

Buying a house, however, is really horrible for your stress level. Now that I'm no longer married and no longer own a house, I do find that I have far, far less stress in my life than back then. Being single, too, has been great for reducing stress. (The takeaway here is: don't marry the wrong person.)

I once owned adolescent cats that would chase each other around the house at night. One time as my wife and I slept, the pursuit led them over top of the bed; one of them used the side of my head and neck as a bank turn for a rapid change of direction at full speed. Thankfully the angle was such that I did not receive any claw marks to the face, but it definitely impacted my sleep quality.

I’ve always been a pretty good sleeper. I’ve been going to bed at 22:00, fell asleep at 22:05, and woke up at 5:45 after sleeping like a rock.

When my gf and I moved together, this changed.

I still tried to go to bed at 22:00 but sometimes it was an hour later or so. My gf goes to bed between 23:00 and 00:00, which always woke me up. She also needed to go to the toilet once at night, which woke me up again.

But to be fair, when I got up in the morning she was waking up too because she could hear me showering.

When she was working a few hundred kilometres away for a month I noticed how much better my sleep was. That’s when I bought a second bed and moved to our guest room on work-days. Well, sometimes we want to cuddle and fall asleep together, but I’d say 9/10 work-days we’re sleeping in separate beds and it’s g r e a t.

Nothing wrong with a separate bed if that's what works for you. Some folks just don't really have compatible sleep schedules/habits, while otherwise being compatible. It's not like you have to lock the doors and stay apart all night.

Separate beds FTW. Ideally in separate rooms in case winding-down-to-sleep routines are significantly different, in timing or form.

An alternative would be using ear plugs and eye shade.

Those help with light and noise issues, but if someone gets into/out of the bed it'll jostle the bed enough that it might still wake one up.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432177

Shows the quantity of sleep, but to make statements about quality, wouldn't you have to show the proportion of time spent in each stage of sleep at least?

Can someone recommend a good sleep tracker?

I'd avoid a sleep-specific tracker: you'll get more use out of a general activity tracker. I've owned both Fitbit and Garmin devices, they're both solid, although Fitbit is cheaper and more general-wellness-oriented, while Garmin devices tend to be better built, have more features, and are a bit more on the "serious" athletics side. Both will happily track your sleep and sleep phases.

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