How Can Cats Teach Us To Sleep Better?
Although it seems incredible and perhaps strange, cats can teach us to sleep better. That’s right, that pet that many love so much and that others fear can teach us a lot about bedtime habits.
Cats, like many other felines, sleep around 12-16 hours a day. This means that they sleep much more than most mammals and twice as much as humans. Discover what cats can teach us about sleep.
Why can cats teach us to sleep better?
People sleep in a state of hypervigilance
Why do cats sleep so much? Simply because they can. Cats are quintessential predators. Therefore, they have very few enemies and constantly live with a sense of physical security.
That is why most of the cats that we can observe sleeping give us that feeling of sleeping peacefully and without any concern. Not for nothing are they the cousins of the king of the jungle.
There is a large part of people who usually sleep in a constant state of hypervigilance (mind full of ideas), as stated on the website of the Estivill Sleep Clinic, a specialist in sleep disorders. That is why then we do not rest as we should, we suffer from insomnia and we feel exhausted many times throughout the day.
Cats remind us that to get a healthy rest when sleeping, it is necessary to feel safe to put that hypervigilance aside. It is not about erasing all dangers from our memory. It’s about being able to relax in spite of them.
Many people do not do any physical activity
Cats, being predators, do a lot of physical activity. Either hunting real mice or toy mice. Certainly, they tend to have times throughout the day when they do large amounts of exercise.
Many people, however, do not engage in any exercise or physical activity. Despite the fact that activity helps significantly to improve the quality of sleep, as concluded in this article published in the Journal of Sports Psychology in 2015.
The importance of the siesta
Cats have the ability to wake up and go back to sleep in a matter of minutes. This makes felines napping animals throughout many parts of the day.
Human beings distance ourselves from sleep from the moment we get out of bed in the morning. People associate sleep with bed and tend to push it away throughout the day.
However, napping has proven to be very important. Well, it helps us to rest and then continue with daily tasks with more energy, as has been scientifically proven.
Remember that sleep is very important to our lives. As long as we have a better restful sleep, we will have more energy to face everyday life. So, let’s learn from cats and try to have a better quality of sleep.