Sleeping With Your Cat: Is It A Good Idea?

FurryTips is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
sleeping with your cat

If you ask cat owners where do their cats sleep, most of them would probably tell you that their feline friends sleep in the same bed with them. But is sleeping with your cat a good idea or not?

While in general, sleeping with your cat is good for the well being of both humans and felines, in some situations that’s not a good thing. Sleeping with your cat might also involve some risks you need to consider. Let’s find out more about this subject.

Also Worth A Read : The Best Cat Collars

Sleeping With Your Cat: The Good

Sharing the same bed with your fellow feline feels natural to both humans and cats. We all need affection in our lives, cat or human, and curling up in bed besides your furry little friend is known to bring some health benefits.

Most of them relate to a decline in stress and anxiety levels and sleep improvement. Sleeping with a cat is a calming and soothing way to end the day.

Sleeping With Your Cat: The Bad

Sharing a bed with your adorable ball of fur might relieve the stress you accumulated during the day but that until the quality of your sleep goes down the drain.

As you already know, cats are crepuscular, which means that they are most active during dusk and dawn and that our sleep cycles don’t match theirs, thus leading to someone – us mostly – suffering from disrupted sleep. After enough time, most cats start to replicate their owner’s patterns, including sleep cycles, so getting a good night’s sleep shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Sometimes though, it’s the owner who’ll copy his feline’s sleep patterns and that might not be a good thing.

Health Issues

Besides the sleep troubles, there are some health concerns involved as well.

The most common health issues that people have around cats are allergic reactions. There are ways in which you can reduce those reactions, but the best solution would be to create a cat-free zone in your bedroom. So no, no more sleeping with your cat.

Since cats wander around your house all day, they might bring unwanted debris on their paws, including little bits of litter box waste, which is not a healthy ingredient to have in your bed.

Apart from that, some cats may carry parasites. From basic fleas to other more pesky tiny creatures like roundworms and hookworms and all kinds of bacteria living on or inside your cat can cause unwanted illnesses to humans as well. While the odds of contracting most of these bacterial infections and diseases that cat parasites can transmit to humans are low, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible, especially to people with low immune systems, like children and elders.

Conclusion

There is no clear answer to this matter, but a little common sense should reduce the risk. Grooming your cat, cleaning your home, washing your hands after handling the litter box and taking your cat to regular visits to the vet should be enough. In general, if the cat is healthy, there is little risk in contracting any kind of disease, so you’ll only get the positive effects from sleeping with your furry friend.

13 Shares
Pin
Share
Tweet