How Much Sleep Does a Dog Actually Need?

An adult dog needs somewhere between fourteen and sixteen hours of sleep in a twenty four hour day, and a puppy under six months needs eighteen to twenty. Most of the dogs I get called about are getting nine or ten, and a decent share of what the owner is describing as a behavior problem is a dog who is chronically short on rest. It is the most common invisible cause I see and it is also the easiest thing on this list to fix.

This is not a soft claim. An under slept dog has a lower threshold for everything. He reacts faster, recovers slower, bites harder in play, and cannot hold attention through a training session. You can train that dog for months and the ceiling stays where it is until the sleep changes.

The numbers

• Puppies under six months. Eighteen to twenty hours. This sounds absurd and it is accurate. A twelve week old puppy who is awake for more than about an hour at a stretch is overtired, not busy.
• Adolescents, six to eighteen months. Sixteen to eighteen hours, and this is the group most likely to be short.
• Adults. Fourteen to sixteen hours across the day, mostly at night with several daytime naps.
• Seniors. Sixteen to eighteen hours, and broken into more, shorter stretches.

Dogs are not built for one long consolidated sleep the way we are. They sleep in bouts. A dog who never gets an undisturbed ninety minute stretch during the day is not making up for it at night.

What an under slept dog looks like

• The evening crash that never comes. He gets more wired as the night goes on rather than less. This is the single most reliable sign.
• Mouthy and hard in play. Bite inhibition gets worse when a dog is tired, not better.
• Cannot settle without being told. He lies down for forty seconds and gets up again, room to room, all evening.
• Short fuse on walks. Reacting to things he handled fine last week at the same distance.
• Dozing rather than sleeping. Head up, eyes half open, tracking the room. That is monitoring, not rest.
• Worse at the end of the week. Sleep debt accumulates. Friday evening being the worst evening is a classic pattern.

Why adolescents get the worst of it

Somewhere around six or seven months a dog stops taking naps voluntarily. He is interested in everything, the household has stopped enforcing crate time because he outgrew accidents, and he now has enough stamina to stay awake all day. So he does, and then his behavior falls apart, and everyone concludes that adolescence is just like that.

Some of it is adolescence. A meaningful share of it is a dog running on ten hours of sleep. The households that put naps back in the schedule at seven months tend to report that the teenage phase is much less dramatic than they were warned.

How to build the sleep back in

1. Enforce two daytime naps. Crate or a quiet room behind a closed door, ninety minutes to two hours each. Mid morning and mid afternoon. This is the whole intervention for most dogs.
2. Make the sleeping spot dark and boring. Cover the crate, blinds down, away from the front window and the hallway traffic. A dog sleeping in the room where everything happens is on duty.
3. Put activity before naps, not after. Walk, training, chew, then crate. A dog wound up with nothing to come down to just paces.
4. Give a chew as the transition. Twenty minutes of sustained chewing drops arousal and most dogs fall asleep at the end of it.
5. Protect the night. No late high arousal games. Last walk should be a sniffing walk, not a fetch session.
6. Run it for seven days before you judge it. Sleep debt does not clear in one afternoon.

What changes in a week

The first thing owners notice is the evening. A dog who has been sleeping properly for five or six days lies down on his own around eight o'clock and stays down. The second thing is the walks, where the reaction distance quietly improves without you having trained anything. The third is training itself, where sessions that used to fall apart at minute three now hold for the full five.

If a full week of enforced rest changes nothing, then sleep was not your problem and you have ruled out a big variable cheaply. If your dog cannot settle in a crate at all during the day, that is its own project and worth doing, because a dog with no off switch during daylight is going to hit a ceiling in everything else you try to teach him.

Adolescence is when sleep quietly disappears and behavior gets blamed for it, and there is a lot more going on in that window worth understanding. My free adolescent dog blueprint covers the sleep schedule, the training changes, and what to expect month by month. Download the Adolescent Dog blueprint and start with two naps tomorrow.

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.