When cats cannot sleep at night, they interfere with your sleep too. That is why it is important to make them sleep the best way you know when it cannot. Even though cats are known for the long hours that they sleep, those hours are mainly daytime hours. They spend more than half of the day sleeping. That makes the night the time that they are most active.
When their awake time coincides with your sleeping time, be sure that your sleep will be interrupted most of, if not all, the time. When they are not jumping on your bed when you are fast asleep, they will be dashing around your house and knocking down objects until a peaceful sleep turns into no sleep at all.
A cat’s biological clock may be out of sync with humans, which is the main reason for their disturbances at night, but you can still solve the issue. But how do you do it?
How to Make Cat Sleep at Night
Control their sleeping time by changing mealtime
Cats are nocturnal, but domestic cats can adapt to your rhythm. You can make them sleep at night just like the humans in your house. One way to corrupt their natural time is by changing their feeding time. Serving their last meal just at the right time will do the trick.
They will spend the night sleeping heavily just the way you want them to. Digestion makes them sleepy just the way the process affects humans. Therefore, if you want them to adapt to your rhythm and your clock especially at night, you should give them the last meal late in the evening.
That would an hour or two before you go to bed to be exact. It will do magic and save your sleep. The cat will use one or two hours to groom itself before going to sleep.
Keep it playing and exercising during the day
If your cat’s night time activity is a form of attention-seeking and social play, it means your purring friend did not get enough of these activities during the day. When a cat does not play and exercise enough during the day, they may have to become active during the night when you should be slumbering.
Whenever they feel the urge to play and exercise at night, they will interrupt your sleep in the process. You can and should offer several social play sessions to your cat. For instance, keep it playing and interacting with you during the late afternoon to early evening hours. When you do that, you will help it to expend most of its energy so that it can also rest at night.
Likewise, meeting the cat’s social interaction and behavioral needs during the day quenches that desire so that they can stay calm during the night.
Enrich the cat’s environment
You should widen your cat’s world to stop it from getting bored. Think of what will inspire the interest to be active in the cat and create an environment that will prevent it from boredom during the day. For instance, you should install several scratching posts at strategic points in your home for the cat to access easily.
The catching post should be at least 1.5 times taller than the cat. Cats also need hiding spaces for hiding and seek games. You can create such spaces using cut up boxes. You can also add feeding puzzles and cat water fountains where the purring friend can drink moving water just like they usually like.
For indoor cats, make them watch cad videos and buy an outdoor enclosure to help stimulate it. Such an environment helps nurture a cat that can rest during the night and stay active during the day. The Environment keeps cats busy all day so that they can sleep at night and save your night’s sleep just like that.
Final Thoughts on How to Help Cat Sleep at Night
You can apply any if not all of these methods. If they do no work out for you as you expected, you should contact your vet for more information or further advice. It is highly unlikely that all these options can backfire. Since cats also differ in several ways, you should try all the methods to find the method that works best with your cat the most.
