How Many Hours do Cats Sleep?

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Cats are one of those animals who always seem to be sleeping off and on during the day. They can be playing one minute, and lazing on the couch the next, with their eyes closed and dozing off in a happy slumber. Cats do have an average number of hours of sleep that they will get, if they are a healthy feline.

Cats live a totally different type of lifestyle than humans, and their sleep patterns are geared to match this lifestyle and their natural-born instincts. Cats will typically spend about 14 hours a day sleeping. They spend so much time sleeping as a way to conserve their energy to do what cats do best, and that is to hunt and pounce on their prey. Hunting and pouncing requires a lot of energy, and sleeping helps cats to save up this energy for when they need it most. Keep in mind that not all of their sleep is deep sleep. A lot of the time you see them with their eyes closed and they appear to be in a deep sleep, they are merely cat napping. A lot of people say that cats sleep with one eye open due to their instinct to be prepared to pounce on anything that threatens them. Although there is a sense of truth to this, they don’t physically have one eye open. They sleep in a heightened sense of awareness, which means they are more napping, than sleeping.

If you have ever heard your cat prowling around the house late at night and wondered what that crazy cat was doing up at those hours, it’s because that is when care are most active. They get the most active at dusk and dawn, which is when they do most of their hunting and looking for prey. Because it’s their instinct to hunt at night, just like the cats in the wild, they do the majority of their sleeping during the day.

Kittens have similar sleep patterns as the adult cats, however, due to their quickly growing bodies, they need about 2-3 extra hours of sleep per day. As they mature, they will begin to merge into an adult sleep pattern and not require quite as much.

With 14 hours of sleep being the average for a healthy adult cat, if you begin to notice that your cat is sleeping more, or for extreme periods of time, it’s always a good idea to have your feline checked by a doctor. Illnesses, among other issues, may cause a need for an  increase in sleep, and it should be checked out.

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