Are You Losing Sleep Because of Your Pet? Use This Calculator to Find

Angela Vuckovic
by Angela Vuckovic
Your pet is costing you sleep- and this fun calculator helps you find out exactly how much.


It seems that being a pet parent has (at least) one shared woe with human parenthood: your fur baby is impacting the quality of your sleep. A British blinds company did a market research to find out exactly how much having a pet disrupts your sleep, and the data they’ve gathered is honestly quite surprising.


According to Hillarys and their ‘ Lost Sleep Calculator For Pet Owners’, cat people have it much harder than dog lovers. On average, in the first year of their pet’s life, feline pet parents lose a whopping 728 hours of sleep (a whole month!) whereas puppy parents lose about half of that, averaging at 330 hours or two weeks. OK, I can see how kitties, which love nothing more than to start playing chase with their imaginary friends at 3 AM, would cost their owners a lot of quality shut-eye time when compared to dogs. But a whole month? Something doesn’t add up here, peeps.


To boot, the numbers go waaaay up when you type in the years you’ve spent with your precious four-legged companion. I wasn’t lazy, so I added all of my cats and dogs to the calculator to see if I’ll cause a glitch on the website. I didn’t, but here is what the calculator had to say: my furry torturers apparently caused me to lose 3.3 whole years of sleep in the last decade, and in the time I had them I had to scoop 12,740 dog poos and change 37,230 litter trays. While at times it might seem like these numbers are spot on, I’m still standing, so it’s more likely that they are a bit off.


The data company gathered also gave us some fun insights into how all that sleep loss reflects on pet parent’s everyday life- which sound more spot on than the lost sleep numbers. For instance, 1 in every 8 pawrents had accidentally switched their pet’s food for their own after a sleepless night, and 1 in 3 pet owners starts off the day right- with their furball sitting on their face. The things we do for love!


What do you think? Did your precious pet really cause you to lose as much sleep as the calculator indicates? Share your results with us!

Angela Vuckovic
Angela Vuckovic

A proud mama to seven dogs and ten cats, Angela spends her days writing for her fellow pet parents and pampering her furballs, all of whom are rescues. When she's not gushing over her adorable cats or playing with her dogs, she can be found curled up with a good fantasy book.

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