Long tossing for falling asleep. Don’t sleep well. Wake up too early. One in ten adults is chronically bothered by this, according to one Canadian overview article. Studies among students In Southeast Asia, even percentages of 35 to 70 percent were found-and the Brain Foundation keeps it halfway. Is it typical for people, with their hunted lives and screens until late in the evening? Or do animals also suffer from this?
In laboratories, mice and rats are a widely used model for sleep research. Just like people, they show clear sleep-wake cycles, including REM sleep (the phase of Rapid Eye Movementsassociated with dreams). When these animals are exposed to stress, social insulation or different light schedules, they develop sleep disorders They are strikingly similar to human insomnia. That makes them valuable models for unraveling the physiology of sleep and the mechanisms behind insomnia, and for testing sleep medication.
Other mammals can also experience sleeping problems. Monkeys sometimes show insomnia when their housing is too sterile or too noisy, or when they are under social pressure. An American study It was noted that the sleeping behavior of chimpanzees in captivity was “dynamic and complex”, “with frequent awakening.” Resuses that In another study Early from their mother were divorced, had their entire lives raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol and showed a disturbed sleep-wake rhythm.
Belgian and German researchers analyzed Hundreds of hours in nocturnal video recordings from wild chimpanzees in Africa. They discovered that chimpanzees normally have one uninterrupted sleeping period per night, in principle just like us, in contrast to the ‘dynamic’ sleepers from the American zoo study. But under the influence of external factors, the chimps often woke up, for example due to heat, rain, the presence of predators, and disruption by people or elephants.
Dogs and cats are also not immune to sleeping problems. Some very old dogs get ‘dog dementia‘, in which the sleep-wake rhythm becomes disrupted-just like with many people with Alzheimer’s. Furthermore, dogs are not so much sleeping in or over, but Other things such as narcolepsy (fall asleep at unexpected moments) and sleep apnea (a sudden breathing stop while sleeping). Some dogs, and also cats, may suffer from nightdarling or hyperactivity due to stress, for example after surgery Or with changes in their diet or living environment.
Larger mammals, such as horses and cows, naturally sleep short and fragmentary: in total only about four to five hours per day. They mainly sleep standing, but they have to lie down for their daily half-hour brake sleep. In places where cows have too little room to lie, or are stressed by the farm practices, they sleep less than average. With horses it is ‘REM-Deprivation Syndrome’ A well -known phenomenon: They fall to when they have not been lying for too long.
And then you have all kinds of animals that never sleep with two brain halves at the same time: whales and dolphins, which have to actively breathe above water 24 hours a day, but also non-stop flying birds such as albatrosses and common swallows. Penguins are record holders: they do ten thousand microduts in a day and never sleep longer than 34 seconds. According to our definition, we would call that considerable insomnia. But for all these animals this is the most normal thing in the world. Birds only get sleeping problems when people disturb them. Various studies made connections with city light and noisebut also with climate change.