How does a night in the same bed with a partner affect sleep?

Perhaps you guessed it this way -Recent research findings suggest that sharing a dream with a partner has a positive effect on mental health, memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills. Researchers found that couples who fall asleep in the same bed every night had better sleep quality, especially with regard to the rapid phase of sleep REM (rapid eye movement) - the phase associated with dreams. Let me remind you that the REM phase begins 90 minutes after falling asleep and alternates between the four other stages of deep and light sleep. Poor sleep quality, on the other hand, is associated with Alzheimer's disease and depression.

To get enough sleep and feel good, try to persuade the person you like to sleep in the same bed

Why sleeping together is good

As the results of the study showed,published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, a good relationship with a partner appears to affect sleep quality. According to Henning Johannes Drews, lead author of the study and post-doctoral student at the Center for Integrative Psychiatry in Germany, the findings of the work are a departure from the generally accepted opinion and previous studies on how sleep with a partner affects sleep quality. Moreover, joint sleep seems to stabilize the REM phase.

During the study, 12 couples wereinvited to spend the night in a sleep lab. Using polysomnography, a type of sleep study that records brain waves, movement, and oxygen levels in the blood, scientists observed the sleep of invited subjects. Couples slept in the lab four nights for two days off. One weekend, they slept in two different single rooms. In the following - in the same room on two shifted beds. Each pair was given two sets of sheets and two blankets.

Good relations between partners are the key to a quality and healthy sleep, and, possibly, vice versa

When the couples slept together, they reported an improvementsleep quality. However, the researchers did not find any differences in indicators such as the total sleep time or the time required to fall asleep. However, they found that the REM phase increased. Subsequently, it turned out that the partners who shared the bed were more likely to synchronous sleep mode. Moreover, the authors of the work revealed a connection between good relationships and sleep synchronization, which implies a full-fledged relationship between couples.

Partnerships can protect people from mental illness, and some researchers believe that sleep can be a mediator in this regard.

Researchers see two working explanationsreduce disturbances in the REM phase when partners are sleeping separately. The first explanation is purely biological: during the REM phase, the body’s ability to regulate temperature is impaired, which means that aartner can help body temperature remain stable. The second explanation is psychological: a partner can simply make us feel safe. Overall, a relaxing and safe environment promotes deep sleep.

But what other reasons can explain the qualitysleep in the same bed with your spouse? According to Inverse, on the one hand, it may simply be that partners simply fall asleep at about the same time and wake up throughout the night, forcing the sleep cycle to equalize. But even when scientists ruled out cases of waking up in the middle of the night, they still found that 47.5% of the REMs of both partners were synchronized with each other.

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Sleeping partners often moved limbscompared to your colleagues. However, these increased movements did not interfere with the quality of sleep, and the quality of REM sleep remained positive and stable.

As the authors of the scientific work suggest, it is the depth of the relationship that can explain why the sleep phases of both partners synchronize when they sleep. However, this is just a trend - it cannot befully confirmed by experimental data. Moreover, the relationship between shared sleep and the quality of REM sleep has its roots in evolution. From an evolutionary point of view, sleep is definitely a social state. If you look at many primates, more traditional societies or historical descriptions of European societies, you will see that sleeping together is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Thus, for centuries, sleep and social factors have been linked.

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Since this is a small experimentalresearch, the data obtained is not accurate enough to apply them to everyone. In addition, the study has several limitations, since only heterosexual couples took part in the experiment. Finally, scientists suggest that sharing a bed is probably not a way to improve sleep if you have problems like insomnia, apnea, and other illnesses. And yet, the results of the new work showed that sharing a bed does not necessarily mean the absence of a good night's rest, but vice versa.