Could Sleeping With Pets Help Your Health?

Therefore, we thought we would bring you some of the benefits and drawbacks to having pets in your bed during the night. Take a look for yourself.

Lower Stress Levels

Sleeping with a pet in your bed does have the effect of significantly lowering your stress levels. This comes as you have an improved level of security and an improved level of comfort, as you get cosy with your pet. This in turn allows you to be able to feel more relaxed and get more sleep through the night.

This increase in sleep and higher level of relaxation is not the only benefit to having a pet in your bed when it comes to relieving stress. You will also receive a deeper sleep after you sleep with your pets for a number of weeks. The movement of your pet in the night disturbs you slightly, as your body sends you into a deeper sleep to avoid this you will find yourself feeling better in the mornings and less tired even if you do not sleep for longer. This is not an immediate benefit however and takes a few weeks for this to take full effect.

Prevents Illness

Your pets sleeping with you in the night actually brings low-level amounts of bacteria to your bed, which may sound bad at first. However, if your dog is clean and pest free you should be fine and this low-level bacteria will in fact help boost your immune system as your body becomes used to it. Your body has to push on your immune system to kill off these bacteria and in turn begins to work harder and push its self a lot more. It is this strong push on your immune system, which significantly helps you fight off other illnesses such as flu or cold before they can become a huge issue and in turn makes sleeping with a pet perfect if you get ill a lot.

Relieve Depression

Sleeping with a pet that increases your level of security can alleviate depression; this comes to us in a number of ways. Firstly, there is the fact that a pet helps to be able to offer a soothing presence in its sleep, simply stroking a poet as it drifts off can help take your mind off things and in turn give some short-term relief.

Then there is the fact that pets offer acceptance of their owners regardless of issues they may be having, this in turn means that the pet its self doesn’t care if you’re depressed and will always have a loving and affectionate side towards you if it sleeps in your bed.  Then finally, pets alter the social behaviour of humans around it. The simple fact you have a pet will make you behave differently and with a higher level of responsibility, having this carry through into the bed room of a night will in turn grow you as a person and help fight off signs of depression.

Warmth

When you sleep in the same bed as a pet you can use it to your advantage during the winter to be able to gain warmth, the body heat from your pet sleeping in your bed will significantly warm your bed up and in turn you won’t feel as cold throughout the night. Then in the summer, you simply allow the pet to sleep on top of the sheets or make space between you and your pet to be able to ensure you do not over heat through the warmer months.

If you want to start letting your pet sleep in your bed in the night but simply don’t have enough room, come and take a look at what beds Longbeds have available to be able to give you that extra space.