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When you’ve got a scroll of bad habits that put a damper on the quality of your sleep, scoring high-quality shut-eye can be tough. Add your partner’s bad sleep habits to the mix, and it can feel downright impossible.
“It’s easy for someone else’s bad sleep habits to impact our own because we’re social creatures,” says Kathryn Tipton, LPC, a Texas-based licensed professional counselor who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. “If your partner is doing something, you’re going to be a lot more likely to go along with it—it’s human nature.”
And even though you know these things are messing with the quality of your sleep (alcoholic nightcaps, for instance), it’s hard to make changes. “Most of us like to keep the peace and the status quo,” says Tipton. “Making changes is hard, and we often resist doing things that make us feel uncomfortable.” This is especially true if those things might cause friction in our relationship.
So what’s a sleepy person to do? “I always encourage couples to be independent sleepers,” says Tipton. Find what works for you as individuals, while also finding other ways to create intimacy in your relationship that don’t (necessarily) involve hitting the sack at the exact same time. “The sooner you can let go of the ideals in your head, the more flexible you’ll become on the range of options you have to solving your sleep woes,” says Tipton.
The best place to start is to course-correct how you handle your partner’s bad sleep habits in order to improve your own. One bad habit at a time, here’s how experts recommend turning things around.
There are plenty of reasons for your sleep pattern not matching up with your partner’s, but the cause is usually work-related. They may also simply lack the self-discipline to go to bed at a set time, devouring television shows or playing video games until odd hours.
This can affect both the consistency of your own sleep schedule and the quality of your sleep, says Tipton. Instead of an uninterrupted night of shut-eye, your sleep might get chopped up by their alarm going off, phone ringing, shower running and other benign noises that, when you’re sleep-deprived, can annoy your body into staying awake.
The Fix: To avoid waking each other up, start by switching to a vibrating alarm clock, says Tipton. Using ear plugs and a white noise machine can also be helpful in drowning out noise while your partner’s awake, and these gizmos can do same for your partner while you’re up doing your thing.
“People who fall asleep to the television have essentially developed a behavioral association or habit,” says Anil Rama, M.D., a doctor of sleep medicine at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine in California. The television (or tablet) emits a significant amount of noise and melatonin-suppressing blue light, which will delay your partner’s bedtime—and, unfortunately, yours too.
The Fix: If your partner isn’t willing to fall asleep without a show on in the background, try reducing the brightness of the television or adding a blue light filter to the screen. Most TVs have a sleep timer and can turn themselves off after a certain amount of time, says Tipton.
If they find it difficult to wear headphones while trying to sleep, you can always resort to wearing an eye mask to block the light, and ear plugs to help muffle the sound, says Tipton.
Many parents sleep in the same bed as their kids, but not every parent can score a good night’s sleep with a restless child squeezed in next to them. (The elbows to the face alone are enough to keep even the soundest-sleeping parent awake.) “There’s no right way to handle this, but ultimately, it involves you being in a child-free bed,” says Tipton.
The Fix: If it’s a once-in-a-while thing, you can gently return your child to their bed once they’ve fallen back asleep. But if it’s ongoing, you could either place another bed in your child’s room for your partner to snooze in when a sleepless night hits, or you could leave a sleeping bag on the floor of your room for them to retreat to when they have a bad dream.
“They can feel comforted by being in your room, and not have to be in your bed to do it—a possible win-win,” says Tipton.
Because alcohol causes your whole body to relax, including your throat, your partner drinking before bed could subject you to louder snoring. “Although it can initially make you sleepy, booze causes wakefulness as it leaves the bloodstream,” says Tipton. This can lead to more tossing and turning later in the night, not to mention an uptick in bathroom trips.
The Fix: If your partner has no interest in nixing their nightcap, battening down the hatches to protect your quality of sleep is paramount. Pull out all the stops—ear plugs, white noise machine and an extra blanket in case their rustling leaves you with a mere corner of the one you normally share. And if they tend to thrash as they get restless, you can put a body pillow between the two of you for added protection.
