Why Some Cats Stop Sleeping Next to You

My husband and I have an unspoken competition in our household over which cat is going to sleep on or near us. For a long time Thelma would sleep at my feet, then one day, out of the blue, she switched over to Cory and stayed there for months. Then she switched back to me, and now she’s back on Cory. LOL. It’s a total merry-go-round.

Louis, on the other hand, is very diplomatic and sleeps in between us. But Thelma? There’s no telling when she might give one of us the boot and move to the other.

So when a cat who used to sleep on you suddenly doesn’t, I’ve learned not to take it personally. Cats rearrange where they sleep all the time, and a spot that was perfect in March can be wrong by June for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

If you want the short version, these are the most common reasons a cat stops sleeping next to you:

• They found a better spot (for now). Cats are picky. If there’s a spot that’s warmer, higher, or a tad quieter, they might just be on the next stop in their rotation.
• The bed smells different. If it’s laundry day, or if you bought a new comforter, those can all have an impact on where your cat decides to sleep.
• You move too much in your sleep. If you toss and turn, or you’re sleeping in a new position, your cat might feel unsettled and look for a new place to catch some Zzzzz’s until you settle down.
• The temp. Sometimes if we’re sleeping hot or cold, our cats might be affected by that and seek somewhere more comfortable for the time being.
• A big change at home. If you have houseguests, or got a new pet or addition to the family, or moved, big changes can affect cats in different ways. Once they get back to their new normal, chances are they’ll come back to you.
• They’re getting older, or something hurts. If you notice a strange sleeping pattern in your cat, or that they can’t jump up on the bed when they used to, reach out to your vet and let them know.

They rotate, and they kick each other out

Even in our own house, the cats rotate where they sleep, and sometimes one will straight up kick the other one out of a spot. They have their favorites. There’s a cozy chair in our office, and usually one or both of them will sleep on top of it. There’s a cat bed in our bedroom that Louis will take during the day, especially if he’s kicked Thelma out of it, and at night he sort of takes it over while Thelma comes into the bed with us. We have another cat bed in the living room by the window that’s pure Thelma, and I’ve never once seen Louis sleep in it. Then there are two chairs in the living room, where Louis usually takes the right one and Thelma takes the left, and they’re both known to end up on the dining room chairs too. Usually we’ll find one or the other in one of these spots, but it’s sporadic, and there’s no real predicting where they’ll land.

We’re not the only ones. One cat owner described the exact same cycle:

My cats goes through phases. She’ll sleep with me for months on end and then one night, she’ll decide that she prefers the couch. After a few months on the couch, she’ll return to sleeping on my bed. There’s no warning and no noticeable reason for the change.

— via Reddit.com

Where they go when they’re not on the bed

Louis and Thelma have taught me a few things about cat beds over the years. We have three identical beds in our apartment, soft donut-shaped fluffy things, and two of them (the ones by windows) get used constantly, while the one in a corner of the bedroom by a chest of drawers gets none. I still don’t know why they don’t like that one. If I had to guess, I’d say a sunny spot by a window beats even the comfiest bed, unless the comfiest bed is also by a window. By early morning Thelma is usually up roaming, asleep on a chair, or at the window watching the sunrise, and during the day she takes the cozy down chair in our office.

They’ve also taught me that we should’ve invested in a cat tree sooner. We finally got them one when they were about a year old, and it’s the best thing we’ve ever bought (LOL). Louis especially loves napping in it, which is next to my desk so he can watch me work (he’s always watching me anyway!). Between the cat tree and the different cat beds we have, location seems to be way more important than how cushy the bed is (funny considering how much we spent on those donut beds). If they aren’t in our bed, they’re most likely by the windows, so I’d check there first. They’ll completely ignore some of the more expensive beds we have for no reason I can figure out, but they’re loving the cat tree!

When the other cat is the reason

Louis has considered himself Thelma’s protector since kittenhood, a job description that also came to include butt-biting once he got big enough for it. So whenever I catch Louis sauntering over to where Thelma’s snoozing on one of us, I brace myself. Will he simply plop down next to his sister, or will he bite her butt and evict her from her spot? It’s hard to know which it’ll be, and I’m not even sure if it’s FOMO or protection (or protection that looks a lot like FOMO, if that makes sense).

So some nights Thelma leaves the bed because she got evicted, not because of anything we did. If you have multiple cats and one of them stops sleeping with you, keep an eye on who else shows up right before the other one leaves. Working from home, we have a front-row seat to the sibling politics every day, and the answer is sometimes just that.

It’s usually scent, not you

Because the cats are so scent focused, I do worry whenever we wash the sheets, and we’ve had a couple of instances where we got a new duvet or a new comforter. Thankfully, the cats haven’t really been deterred by any of that. Louis is the specific one. He’s got two suckle blankets, one he loves and one he doesn’t, and if we put the one he doesn’t like on the bed, he’s constantly trying to avoid it. He’ll still come up, but he won’t snuggle quite as much. Thelma is the same way about scent in general. She once boycotted her favorite water bowl for days because it went through the dishwasher and came out smelling like the dishwasher instead of like home, so now we hand-wash it.

If your cat moved off the bed right after laundry day or a new comforter, that’s worth considering before you take it personally. Leaving their own blanket up there gives them a scent they recognize.

After a move, or a houseful of guests

We moved apartments at one point, and that was the most nervous I’ve ever seen either of them. It took Thelma about a year (!) to feel totally at ease walking into the new kitchen. A year! Lately there’s been construction in the apartment above ours, and they’ve taken that surprisingly well, although a sudden loud noise is a different story: a plastic garbage bag rustling or Cory sneezing still sends both of them down the hall and under the bed like they’re facing certain death. Nothing bad has ever happened to them, for the record. It’s just the way they are.

Guests are a different thing. When there are people over, Louis flips onto his back within about a minute, while Thelma takes the cautious route: she hides, peeks out, slowly makes her way to a high vantage point, and keeps an eye on everything with a suspicious look. So after a move, I wouldn’t start wondering where anyone’s sleeping after days, but after a few months. And after a weekend of houseguests, I wouldn’t expect them back in their usual spots the next morning, but a night or two later. Once things are quiet again, they drift back on their own.

We sleep like mummies so they won’t leave

If you’re lucky enough to have a cat sleep on you, you know all too well that if you make one wrong move, they can just hop off, and this happens all the time. It’s why, whichever cat is sleeping on us, we sleep like mummies. I swear I’ve woken up with frozen ankles so many times because I’m afraid to move. We really want them to sleep with us, so we’re very cautious about how we sleep when we have a cat on us. One wrong move and they’ll jump down off the bed.

The early days versus now

It’s amazing what a difference a few months make. In the beginning, if we so much as breathed wrong, Thelma would be off the bed, which is where the whole sleeping-like-a-mummy thing came from. It was basically a game of statue, LOL. It’s much more laid back now. Even if one of us has to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (thankfully, because we’re not holding it), they just settle back down and carry on. I think they’ve finally figured out we’re not going to toss them out.

Louis has his own routine now, too. His alarm is the automatic feeder, which goes off at five in the morning. After he eats he comes up to bed and sits on my chest or Cory’s chest, then settles on his blanket (which we bring up onto the bed before we get in, so it’s there between the two of us) and suckles and makes biscuits until he falls back asleep. If I’m not petting him enough during all this, he nibbles on my elbow. It just took a lot of patience on our part, and letting them come up whenever they wanted, and now we reap the rewards.

Temperature, if your weather changes

Because we live in Florida, and we’re almost always running the AC, we don’t really notice a big difference in temperature. It did get pretty cold this past winter, but we didn’t notice any difference in their sleep behavior, and they still slept in the same spots. So I can’t say heat or cold has ever pushed one of them off the bed, but if you live somewhere with real seasons, you might see more of it than we do.

How to make the bed worth coming back to

Leave something on the bed that already smells like them. For us that’s Louis’s blanket (his favorite; he has two and avoids the other one), which we bring up every night. You can also try setting up a small cat bed on top of your bed. That gives your cat a place that’s theirs, so they can be near you without being on you.

Leave the bedroom door open so the bed is always an option. And I should point out that we live in Florida, where the air conditioner runs pretty much year-round, so we’ve never needed this one, but if you live somewhere with real winters and keep the house on the cool side, a self-warming pad on the bed makes that spot warmer than the couch. If your cat has stopped jumping up and your vet has already checked them out (see the section below about when a sleep change is worth a visit), a set of pet steps next to the bed makes it reachable without the leap.

What I wouldn’t do is pick your cat up and put them on the bed over and over. We do it once in a while if we’re in the mood for a snuggle, but if the cat jumps off, the cat jumps off. You want them to decide the bed is a great place and go there on their own. Carrying them up defeats the purpose.

What other people’s cats do

My sanity saver is remembering that this is a common theme. It’s almost a running joke on Reddit. There was a whole thread where someone asked whether anyone’s cats actually use their fancy cat beds (hers didn’t), and most of the replies said no, their cats weren’t using theirs either. Some cats go through phases (apparently), but mostly they ignore the beds and sleep in strange places, reasons unknown. It made me feel a lot better about our corner donut bed that nobody uses. Here are some of my favorite replies from that thread.

My cats go through phases of where they want to sleep. Right now, one is really liking the top of the cat tower, and the other is squeezing herself behind my deskside table in front of my yarn stash. Very rarely do they use cat beds in their intended setups – for example, they’ve squashed down the igloo beds and won’t touch them if the cushion is inside them. I do think cats tend to like beds that are higher up, in quieter spots, and/or are more enclosed, but picking a cardboard box over the fancy heated bed is exactly what I’d expect from a cat.

— via Reddit.com

This one is basically our corner donut bed:

Try the beds in different locations. One of mine didn’t use hers until it fell behind the sofa in a little den Also have you tried catnip?

— via Reddit.com

And the one I’d frame if I could:

My kitty doesn’t use his bed at all even though it’s nice and soft and fluffy but instead will come sleep with me for some of the night He’ll lay himself right next to me, and put his head on the pillow with me, so I’ll pull the blanket over him and wrap my arm around him ❤️

— via Reddit.com

The one reason to take seriously

The one I’d actually want on your radar is related to age and pain. If you notice a strange sleeping pattern in your cat, or that they can’t jump up on the bed when they used to, reach out to your vet and let them know. Cats hide pain really well, so a change in where they sleep is sometimes the first sign that something’s wrong, especially if they’ve started sleeping somewhere hidden like the back of a closet.

What we actually do about it

Once you’ve ruled out the serious version, you’re mostly looking at a cat doing, well, normal cat things. We just let them sleep where they want to sleep. Sometimes we’ll bring one of them up if we want to snuggle, and if they get down, they get down.

Other people do the same thing. One owner’s approach after adding a second cat:

Sometimes cats need to be reminded that they’re still welcome. We got another cat and one stopped sleeping in our bed, so I’d bring him to the bed.

— via Reddit.com

As anybody who owns a cat knows, you’ve got to let them do their own thing.

It doesn’t mean they stopped loving you

For a long time, I thought I’d lost the cats. Neither one of them would sit on my lap (I joked that my legs were too scrawny). They preferred to climb into Cory’s lap while he sat at his desk during the day and stay there for thirty minutes at a time. Louis does lap time with me now, and he headbutts my hand asking for pets. And Thelma, the daddy’s girl, has come around to me over the last year, and sleeps at my feet on and off.

The mornings have helped. If I get up and she’s already up, I walk out to her favorite spot in the living room and she looks up at me, we lock eyes, and I pet her head and chin and sing my horrible version of the good morning song (to no apparent dismay on her part). It’s my favorite part of the day, and it has nothing to do with where she slept the night before.