What keeps you awake at night? Global catastrophes, work or family worries, the sense you haven’t fulfilled your potential? Or is it your significant other, transformed into a flailing, thrashing, snoring, 4am-Drag-Race-watching monster? You wouldn’t be alone. Our sleep needs are idiosyncratic and only a lucky few couples find themselves in agreement on the optimum conditions for a good night’s rest. When we aren’t sleep-compatible, pillow feathers can fly.
Dr Heather Gunn is a sleep psychologist based in Alabama who sees couples in her practice; she knows sleep disagreements can cause feelings of anger, rejection and frustration.
“We all feel entitled to our sleep and to the comforts that help us get there,” she says. On top of that, sleep deprivation magnifies emotions, leading to disproportionate reactions.
For Gurpreet Singh, a counsellor with Relate, sleep can sometimes be indicative of what else is going on in the relationship. Nobody, he argues, falls out just because one of them snores. Gunn agrees: “I think of it as sort of a barometer of our interpersonal connectedness – for how the relationship is functioning.” Both emphasise that sleep disagreements can offer a chance to practise conflict resolution and even enhance a relationship. “This is one opportunity to figure out how you problem-solve when you don’t agree, which is a good skill, right?” says Gunn. “I actually love it. To me, it’s like the gateway drug to working on your relationship.”
Singh agrees: “You just need creative thinking. It comes down to people’s ability to resolve conflict rather than accumulate stuff.”
With that in mind, we asked Guardian readers to tell us about their partners’ worst and most infuriating sleep habits, then consulted experts on creative ways of addressing them.
Snoring
Likened to everything from a purring cat to a fighter jet, snoring topped the list of sleep woes, to no one’s surprise. A self-declared snorer said they were “sometimes so loud that I wake myself up”.
When tackling snoring, Dr Sophie Bostock emphasises that it’s important to address the possibility of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), a risk factor for heart disease and stroke, which, unlike “normal” snoring, requires treatment. Bostock describes herself as a “sleep evangelist”; she has researched the impacts of better sleep and worked on developing the Sleepio digital sleep improvement programme used in the NHS. Warning signs of OSA, she says, include “a temporary pause in breathing, choking or gasping for breath”; sufferers may also experience extreme daytime sleepiness, perhaps priding themselves on falling asleep anywhere, any time. “Sleep apnoea pushes you out of the deepest phases of sleep,” Bostock says. “So you can be in bed for nine hours, but actually, you have eight and a half hours of less restorative sleep.”
People hesitate to get checked out for fear of the dreaded Cpap mask, or continuous positive airway pressure ventilator. Worn overnight, these use mild pressure to keep airways open, and they do work. Several contributors raved about the difference masks made to their or their partner’s sleep. For milder sleep apnoea, there are less drastic solutions. “Regular exercise, less sedentary behaviour is going to be beneficial,” says Bostock. She also champions myofunctional therapy, which she describes as “like going to the gym for your tongue”. The tongue is, she says, “a big muscular organ” that can be trained and slimmed down; a 2020 study found losing tongue fat improves sleep apnoea.
The exercises are easy: Bostock recommends ear, nose and throat surgeon Vik Veer’s popular online tutorials.
“Positional therapies” – anything to keep you lying on your side – can also help, Bostock says. She has encountered only one person who has tried the “tennis ball sewn into the back of your pyjamas” hack (it stops you rolling on to your back), but a more moderate solution, such as extra or side-sleeping pillows, can also be effective.
Not letting you snore
Another source of contention is how people try to stop their partners snoring – patting, rolling, shaking, bedside exorcisms – and how those partners react. Attempts to reposition or rouse, however gently, can spark arguments.
“Here’s the thing: everyone deserves good sleep,” says Gunn. Singh agrees it’s about striking a balance between both parties’ needs: “If it’s one night, maybe you push the person – gently, rather than actively out of the bed.”
“I totally understand shaking – I’ve done it myself,” says Gunn. “I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with gently nudging. But when both of you are suffering through the whole night, it’s probably not the best.” Issues arise when it becomes habitual. “Sometimes it leads to a lot of anger on both sides and that’s not conducive for good sleep, either,” says Gunn. Ideally, she says. “It doesn’t get to a point where you have to do that.”
“The snorer can’t help it,” she reminds frustrated snore-endurers, suggesting they try less interventionist approaches: “Are there earplugs, a fan in the room, white noise? Is there another space where you could get really good sleep?”
Here – and in other sleep conflicts – Gunn adheres to a policy of “what’s said at 2am stays at 2am”. “You’re not in your best state, your frontal lobe is not fully activated … when you just wake up, you’re going to be reacting almost primally.” For Singh, sensible conversations tend to happen the next day and shouldn’t be left longer. “Take ownership,” he advises. “If you leave it, then this will fester and you will get angry and you will become resentful. Say, ‘I didn’t get any sleep last night; what shall we do?’”
Different chronotypes and incompatible schedules
Lots of larks and night owls struggle to share a nest and sometimes early rising and late bedtimes are a professional necessity. An actor whose performance nights can end at 2am might live with a French baker whose alarm goes off at 4.30am (though the warm croissants could be some compensation); a farmer who needs to be in bed ultra-early to prepare for 4am milking might have an insomniac spouse who likes the light on to read.
Happy lark/night owl cohabitation is possible. Gunn points out that there isn’t strong evidence that different schedules or “chronotypes” (your natural tendency towards early or late nights) lead to poorer relationship outcomes, so couples should feel reassured on that score. “There’s not a lot of good data that if you go to bed at the same time, you will have a better relationship.”
That’s not to minimise the potential disruption. “If somebody gets up early and the other person gets up late, it can affect intimacy,” notes Singh. If the sticking point is sex, he is an advocate of “planned eroticism” (scheduling, basically), but it can be about closeness more generally. “Create some bedtime routine and morning routine in which you can connect,” he says. Not spending the whole night together doesn’t mean you can’t, for instance, get into bed together the next morning. Some couples in Gunn’s practice have tried going to bed at the lark’s bedtime, then the night owl getting back up later.
If you’re desperate to stick to the same schedule, it might be down to the night owl to come to bed before their usual time. Research suggests it’s surprisingly easy in that direction. Participants in a study who went into the wilderness for a weekend without artificial light found that their release of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin came 1.4 hours earlier than usual after only two days, aligning with the sunset. In another study lasting a week, that shift was two full hours.
You can try this at home, Sophie Bostock says, but it requires “absolute consistency”. That means getting up at the same time every morning (an hour’s lie-in at the weekend is OK, but no more), eating breakfast within an hour of rising and exercising first thing. These, Bostock explains, are “zeitgebers” – cues for your body clock. Conversely, in the evening, eat early (two or three hours before the desired bedtime) and adopt dim lighting; she suggests using candles to prompt yourself.
Temperature and duvet theft
From people who sleep fully dressed, burritoed in blankets, to those who go naked under a sheet with the window open, our internal thermostats can play havoc with relationships. Worse, people’s temperature issues can make them go rogue. Yes, they’re “asleep” and “don’t mean it”, but duvet and mattress space theft is not a victimless crime, as cold readers testified. “My lovely partner’s sleeping style is what I would call the rotisserie chicken,” wrote one. “We are small people but might need to consider doubling or even tripling the size of our bed to accommodate his nightly rotations.” “My wife is an egregious encroacher,” complains another, detailing his complex strategy to resist her nocturnal land grabs, all in vain. “Many nights I have slept on a sliver of our bed, sometimes with one hand on the floor to keep me from falling off.”
Gunn and Bostock are united in thinking the northern European two-duvet solution could work here; both encountered and admired it while travelling. “I thought: ‘This is the most genius thing,’” marvels Gunn of her experience in Germany. “There’s no reason to suffer here,” she adds. “You could have your own bedsheets, bed covers, whatever, and that would help.”
Noise, light and phones
Whether it’s the BBC World Service, TV crime dramas or white noise, some people can’t sleep without sound; others require absolute silence. Light levels cause similar conflicts.
“Sometimes people can tolerate a certain level of noise,” says Gunn. “Maybe you can find an agreement – a white-noise machine or fan, or something that is less intrusive than TV?” However, she stresses: “I hate for it always to be the person who doesn’t need all the things who has to accommodate the person who needs all the things.” The noise-needer could explore Bluetooth headphones (you can get sleep headphones incorporated into soft headbands); TV watchers could use subtitles. If light is the problem, a low-wattage lamp under, rather than next to, the bed might be less disruptive, Singh suggests.
What about phones? We should treat our beds, Gunn says, like a “protective little bubble: everything we’re inviting into that sleep space is in the service of getting us this rest we deserve.” Phones are the opposite of that: “They activate a lot of the parts of our brain that are not conducive for sleep.” Gunn confesses she speaks “from experience as well as expertise” on this, and suggests couples agree on some nights where they won’t use their phones in bed, instead doing something else together (sex, perhaps, but it could be anything from reading aloud to puzzles). “If you’re going to sleep in the same bed and it’s a time of connection, then you may as well use it for a little bit of connection.”
Singh is stricter on phone usage: “It’s a way of not being present in the bed,” he says. His advice? “Don’t charge your phone next to your bed if you don’t know how to create a boundary with it.”
Other bad behaviour
Limb-flailers, sleepwalkers, inveterate sneezers and sleep-fighters; readers shared experiences of all kinds of unquiet sleep. “I am the villain in this scenario,” confided one contributor. “I shout in my sleep, ‘Help!’ ‘Stop!’ and all manner of frightening expletives. I also started sitting up with fists up, as though ready to fight.” Another wrote: “I get bounced around and feel as though I’m trying to sleep in a washing machine on spin cycle.”
“Most of what we call parasomnia – things like night terrors, sleepwalking, sleep talking – is more common when someone is overtired,” says Bostock. She recommends starting off by working on “classic sleep hygiene stuff”. Restless legs specifically can be a symptom of anaemia, she adds, so consider getting your iron levels checked; the support group RLS-UK has other treatment and management suggestions.
How about the one failsafe, but loaded, solution to sleep compatibility problems: separate beds or bedrooms? “Some people have a hang-up about what it means not to sleep in the same bed,” Gunn points out. Making a success of it may mean finding other times to be together, according to Singh: “If we’re going to take such a vital time of the relationship away, then unless it’s replaced with something else, the relationship is going to suffer.”
“It’s OK to have separate bedrooms,” says Bostock, who says sleep-deprived couples are more likely to be argumentative, impatient and irritable. She hates the term “sleep divorce”. “It’s not a divorce. It’s about optimising your health and wellbeing and the quality of your rest – and who wouldn’t want to do that?”
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