Should couples sleep together, or apart, if they want better sleep?
The consensus of expert opinion seems to be that sleep divorces are fine, even if just for a few nights per week, if couples are struggling with snoring, tossing and turning.
The renewed discussion over this question, it is suggested, appeared after Netflix's The Crown showed us that Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh slept in separate bedrooms for much of their long marriage.
Photo: Paulus Rusyanto
Dr Alex Bartle, from the Sleep Well Clinic, tells Jim Mora that there’s a variable answer to whether sleeping together or alone is better.
“If you’re sleeping with somebody who is very disturbing, with very strong loud snoring, or sleep apnea, or wriggling ‘round, then it’s not so good for your sleep and objectively, if somebody is snoring next to you, it does disturb your sleep, even if you are asleep.
“Emotionally, there’s a huge positive aspect to sleeping with somebody. So there are two sides to the coin really.”
In the Victorian era, it was a popular facet to be sleeping in separate beds in the same room, he says.
“In fact, doctors were even saying that it was actually unhealthy to sleep so close to somebody else and it was only really in the late 1940s and ‘50s that it became less popular to sleep in two separate single beds.”
The University of Arizona’s sleep and health research programme looked at more than 1000 working age adults and found that people who share their beds with their partner have less severe insomnia, less fatigue, more sleep time, and they also report being more satisfied with their lives and relationships.
But Dr Bartle says our perception of whether we slept well can be influenced by our perception that sleeping with somebody is better.
“So emotionally you can convince yourself I’m sure that you do feel well during the day.
“And there’s this great expectation on the people of course to say, I’m fine, I didn’t have much sleep but I can go through the day and it doesn’t bother me sort of thing because you’re greatly involved or invested in wanting to sleep with you partner.”
In fact, we don’t sleep all night, but wake up at intervals, and that’s perfectly normal, he says.
“People think they should sleep through the night, which of course ends up with [the person] saying ‘if I wake up and I look at the clock and it has an emotional impact on me and I’m awake and I shouldn’t be awake’, yes you should, waking is normal.
“But can you go back to sleep? That’s the question. And when you have people with insomnia, of course, they wake up and just think there’s something wrong whereas in fact there isn’t anything wrong.”
Whether someone has worse sleep when their partner is absent is also variable, he says, but it can affect their sleep if the before-bed routine is lost.
“We all have routines before bed and that helps our brain to say, yes, I'm about to go to sleep so it’s the routine that’s important.
“Someone who regularly snores as a purring regular snore can be quite reassuring ... and if they’re not there, ‘I'm disturbed, I'm worried, this isn’t normal’, so it’s the routine again that we get used to.”
What’s clear is that we have quite individual sleep needs and there are ways to work around those needs, he says.
“Really quite commonly, I see people who are married, who one’s the lark and one’s the owl if you understand that concept. One’s a very morning person and wants to go to sleep at sort of 8.30 or 9pm and the other one can’t go to sleep until midnight or later.
“So either [they’ll] come to a compromise … but more commonly now what we suggest is that maybe they go to bed together, with the early one, they have a cuddle, one goes to sleep, and the night owl gets up and … they can go to bed at midnight and go to sleep.”
Dr Bartle’s tips for those struggling to sleep in general come under three strategies:
- sleep hygiene (no alcohol, reducing caffeine, being relaxed, going to bed later rather than earlier, and spending more time outdoors),
- stimulus control (not being in bed if you’re not falling asleep within about 30 minutes)
- gradually trying to raise your sleep efficiency (the amount of time in bed you’re asleep).
"Sleep is all about confidence and that’s what we’re trying to engender in people who can’t sleep, is that they can actually go back to sleeping properly again, that they can be confident that when they go to bed, they can go to sleep.”
