How Sharing a Bed Changed My Sleep

http://www.thedurkweb.com/how-sharing-a-bed-with-my-girlfriend-changed-my-sleep/

by sdurx • 9 years ago

106 93 9 years ago

codingdave• 9 years ago

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.

dclowd9901• 9 years ago

...for you.

ci5er4• 9 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin9• 9 years ago

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.

tlrobinson• 9 years ago

+1 for a king sized. Also memory foam.

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.

Broken_Hippo3• 9 years ago

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.

rconti• 9 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin9• 9 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

Move crib to living room, leave wife in bed, sleep on couch. Problem solved. Been there, done that.

knicholes• 9 years ago

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.

zzalpha• 9 years ago

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).

falcolas• 9 years ago

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.

ryan-allen• 9 years ago

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 :)

codemogul• 9 years ago

Extra points: Provide a graph showing correlation (or inverse) sexytimes vs Bedtime(apart) and Bedtime(together) LOL

sdurx• 9 years ago

Have been explicitly forbidden ;(

caseysoftware• 9 years ago

I honestly LOL'd at this, especially trying to imagine the discussion:

"But honey, it's for science! Don't you want to make the world a better place!?"

sdfhbdf2• 9 years ago

I honestly don't know what to make of this. Is this a good or a bad sign? Too long? Too short?

gutnor• 9 years ago

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)

TillE• 9 years ago

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.

fiatjaf3• 9 years ago

So in the past when there were less people per square miles on Earth there was less space and people had to share beds?

brewdad2• 9 years ago

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.

eeZah7Ux2• 9 years ago

Heated rooms were for kings and aristocrats, everybody else had to share smaller rooms to keep the heat if they lived in colder climates.

pbhjpbhj• 9 years ago

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.

neom• 9 years ago

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

Working article link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yrb4OPB...

majewsky• 9 years ago

Looks like hug of death:

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.)

fiatjaf3• 9 years ago

Because it is using Wordpress or some other useless PHP-based CMS.

colejohnson662• 9 years ago

They're not useless if the person using them can't program

sdfhbdf2• 9 years ago

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.

A good alternative would be to use github pages.

colejohnson662• 9 years ago

It requires a database connection because it's Wordpress and Wordpress stores the article's content in the database, not the filesystem.

yasoob• 9 years ago

Open it using Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.t...

shaunrussell• 9 years ago

Site down.

Advice: set up cloudflare for caching / cdn, it is free.

bbcbasic• 9 years ago

Not bad advice, if is good enough for HN...

fiatjaf3• 9 years ago

"Error establishing a database connection"

Oh, PHP and MySQL.

Viper007Bond• 9 years ago

What's PHP have to do with an overloaded database server?

Jedd• 9 years ago

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.

brewdad2• 9 years ago

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.

saghm2• 9 years ago

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.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

Fewer countable things, less stuff.

gugagore• 9 years ago

I think it's because, while "covers" is countable, you have a sort of continuous control of how much cover you have.

Broken_Hippo3• 9 years ago

Oh, she is onto something. I moved to Norway a few years back, and find that to be quite wonderful.

eumenides1• 9 years ago

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.

88e282102ae2e5b• 9 years ago

These differences appear quite small. It would really benefit from just having error bars, or any kind of significance test.

noobermin• 9 years ago

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?

kortex• 9 years ago

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.

raisedbyninjas• 9 years ago

He really needs to plot more than hours. Restless sleep is just has harmful. My Xiaomi Mi Band can track deep sleep. I'm sure a fitbit can.

tvelichkov• 9 years ago

Lol, you have no idea whats coming for you when you have a baby.

toomuchtodo2• 9 years ago

Once your child makes it to a year, it's less "gates of hell" and more "mildy soul crushing".

atemerev• 9 years ago

Mildly?

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.

ryanwaggoner• 9 years ago

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).

le-mark• 9 years ago

Those of us who's children didn't sleep until 2+ really really hate you and people like you.

toasterlovin3• 9 years ago

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.

RandomInteger4• 9 years ago

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.

orthoganol• 9 years ago

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.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

I'm 31 and I've never had a partner

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.

inopinatus• 9 years ago

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.

r3bl• 9 years ago

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?

dankohn1• 9 years ago

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.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/sexual-activity-tracked-by...

sowbug• 9 years ago

Or the FitBit is confused by the second person, counting both person's movements as the wearer's movements.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

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.

seshagiric• 9 years ago

The title takes the cake for click bait :)

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.

dang• 9 years ago

We took Show HN out of the title because the article is more of a blog post than a thing people can try.

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.

timwaagh• 9 years ago

glad you are getting laid man. but this is like such a non issue.

Camillo• 9 years ago

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.

SeoxyS• 9 years ago

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.

markyc2• 9 years ago

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)

oski• 9 years ago

Which kind of earplugs did you settle on?

markyc2• 9 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Quies-Pair-Foam-Earplugs-Pack/dp/B009...

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

_nalply• 9 years ago

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.

How Sharing a Bed Changed My Sleep

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