The secret to stop your cat waking you at night 🐱

This is one of the more difficult parts of life with cats. If you’ve experienced your cat meowing, pawing or even clawing at you through the night, you’ll understand just how frustrating and almost soul destroying it can be. No matter what you do, nothing seems to help and the lack of sleep is ultimately affecting your work, your relationships and how you feel about your cat.
I am here to help! There is a secret to success that everybody needs to know in order to resolve this problem and stop the night time activity.
AS ALWAYS... Before starting any behavioural help, do see a vet for this problem first and make sure your cat is healthy. Poorly cats do vocalise at night, so getting them healthy could totally resolve it.
Firstly though, it’s important to know that cats are almost predisposed to this problem, as they are naturally active at dawn and dusk, when most of us are fast asleep. But if this is the case, why aren’t all cats awake during this time? We can teach them to generally match our activity patterns, and learn that night time is for sleeping, or at least being quiet and not bugging us!
As well as this, if they need something, like food, play, comfort or they are scared of something, often they will look to us to give it to them or help them. This can prompt them to wake us up and at first, it’s usually quite low level behaviour. A few minutes of meowing, a little bit of pawing or unsettled behaviour. This usually isn’t a problem. The problem comes when we respond to your cat’s behaviour and give them something they want. Or something they didn’t specifically ask for, but were super happy when it arrived! For example, say your cat was cold and started meowing, you were worried about them so got up and wondered if they wanted some food? Bingo! And your cat is thinking they will be trying that again tomorrow. And the next night, and the next! And here we are!
So to treat this problem, we must resolve the initial reason for the meowing / pawing to make sure your cat is ok, and doesn’t need anything. This could be leaving out food, toys, tons of warm places to sleep and removing anything stressful. You also must make sure they are physically healthy too! But the second part of resolving the issue is to shut off any attention or potential reward they receive from the behaviour and ignore them.
I can guarantee you have tried that already. But here’s the secret! The behaviour of waking you up will always get WORSE before it gets BETTER! So yes you may have tried it, and it would have gone terribly! Now your cat is doubling down on his efforts to wake you up. Meowing louder and for longer! Pawing at your face with claws out instead of just pads. You have to ride this out! They will eventually realise that there is no benefit from waking you up and will go off and settle.
It’s important to have someone on hand to help you with this process because you will feel like giving up. You will be sleep deprived. You will feel like a zombie. And you will get close to hating your cat. It helps to have someone to tell you to stick with it! It will get better, and it absolutely will if you are consistent and stick to the plan.
Give it ten days, maybe two weeks. And see what happens. I have seen this work then and time again and it is so rewarding to get a message from a person who has FINALLY got a good nights sleep and has fallen in love with their cat all over again.
YOU’VE TOTALLY GOT THIS! GOOD LUCK!
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