While it's probably impractical to choose your spot for the night based on your cat's, I think there's actually something we can learn from here:
"Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine]
And I think we – humans – should also follow our mood more often in our everyday lives – even things like sprint planning or building our startups. I feel there's something hidden in the feeling of how you feel (your mood).
For example, you look at these 5 tasks in your backlog and choose what you want to work on based on your mood/excitement/feeling.
Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? And even if that's not the case, you'll just feel better doing a task that you feel excitement for rather than the one you don't feel like doing right now.
Advatages?
1) you just feel better (which I don't have to explain why that is good for you) and
2) you probably finish the task quicker and with a better quality
> Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine]
They miss out a key component for some cats: territory monitoring. My boss seemingly often picks places where she can see a lot by just looking up & around, and can hear what is going on around the flat, when taking a light nap. For a deeper sleep coziness seems to be a higher priority.
This seems to matter to both of mine, but in different ways - they’re siblings. The male always sleeps in the same spot, from which he can see his food, the living room, and the door. The female sleeps next to me in bed. Like clockwork - I go to bed, she follows, and settles down neatly between the wall and me, and doesn’t move until I get up with dawn. I’m the territory, in the latter case, I think. It isn’t warmth - I sleep with the window open, and when I’m not in bed she sleeps in front of the fire, which is warm all night.
That was how I used to believe. What I didn't understand at the time is that there is a difference between "being comfortable" and "being complacent" - and that in order to achieve things or grow yourself, you don't necessarily have to be in a position of discomfort. The self-mortification theory ("push it to the limit, leave your comfort zone") in its extreme, as propagated by growth evangelists (and as it originally came from the field of high-performance sports) is anti-life and wrong.
People are not bonsai trees - and bonsai trees are unnatural freaks of nature. We don't have to contort ourselves to live up to an externally imposed ideal. We can - firmly grounded - become greater than these ideals, simply by growing steadily - at our own speed, and with our own, "natural", methods - even within the speeds at which we feel comfortable.
So: DO listen to your gut feelings. Examine them. And listen to them.
There is nothing wrong with a comfort zone, life is too short really to spend long periods of time in brutal discomfort. Some people ruin their lives this way to the point where it will be impossible to ever be comfortable again before they die.
That's really bad advice for people who are naturally very fragile, have social anxiety or can't deal with confrontation. Unless they start dealing with the feeling of discomfort, they will either suffer their entire life or just reinforce bad habits like avoidance, procrastination, delusion and drug addictions. Lots of people ruin their lives like that.
I feel that you are possibly jumping to conclusions as to what constitutes a "good life" versus a "ruined life". If people who have "small" comfort zones need support to move outside of them.
Throwing categories such as avoidance, procrastination, delusion, and drug addiction into the same group leads me to believe that you might not understand what these supports look like.
Those people are not in a comfort zone, their entire life is discomfort, they just don’t know anything else. They need to move into the comfort zone or their lives will always be ruined.
Based on the fact that the only constant in tech is accumulation of debt, across personal projects/FOSS/paid development, I feel confident in saying that nobody will ever feel like working on some tasks. Those tasks are important and need to be done.
I think a lot of the technical debt I’ve acquired in the past is due to having to rapidly apply business logic to existing systems for customers. This is typically not the type of work that I feel excited about.
I do, to some extent, feel excitement about reducing technical debt. I’d assume that other engineers appreciate taking the time to “clean” outside of writing net new features. I could be totally off base, but I do think it would be interesting to see an environment that was purely mood driven development.
I love your term "mood driven development" (or MDD for short?). I know Gumroad is doing this to at least some extent:
"At the end of the day there's a lot of emotion that goes into Gumroad, that's not dissimilar from an art project. We sometimes pick what's fun and feels good to work on! We love listening to creators! We don't do tons of data analysis to decide what's worth working on." – @shl, founder
I wrote about it more on my post "Startups should be more like art projects" (link somewhere in the comments already, won't add it here again not to spam)
Have you ever heard the phrase "man your battle stations"?
There is another type of station: cleaning stations.
And they make a call "all hands man your cleaning stations".
Every sailor has an area they are responsible for cleaning and they go there and clean.
I've pitched the same for codebases the past few places I have worked: everyone has a cleaning station in the code base and once every few weeks they go to that part of the code and fix or identify and document needed improvements.
Making it a routine action that keeps up with incremental changes and ideally lowers effort on keeping a code base clean.
This is a great suggestion. My manager hates the term "tech debt", because it's too vague and everyone has their own idea of what constitutes tech debt. But what we can enumerate are things like heavily intertwined logic and IO, difficult to follow business logic, poor documentation, long functions, etc.
Do be careful as a 100% investment in such a strategy will destroy your will power. Will power is a muscle that needs to be exercised by doing things you don't feel like doing.
Ideally management is not dogmatic about 'take from the top' for several reasons, but I like your suggestion to account for mood as well. There are definitely tasks that are mood-swingers one way or the other. Choose work based on where you want your mood to go (or can responsibly mood-sustain, if the mood-delta is negative).
Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Whether its feasible on teams may vary.
Hey, Rauno! I’ve been following your projects for a while and noticed that your Twitter profile links all 404. That’s gotta be hurting your conversions on your sales pages!
Did you change Twitter handle or is the account gone?
> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now?
I very strongly believe there is a bigger unconscious component to productivity than there is a conscious one.
Some mornings I wake up and I want to jump into the super nasty bucket of customer support tickets. "What the hell is still broken!? I am gonna fix that shit".
On others, I will find customer support items antagonistic in every way, but would really like to spend time on a bunch of deep tech debt that has been piling up.
And then there's the mornings where I wake up and I'd rather just play overwatch or <insert latest AAA title> all day. And you know what? At this point, I just fucking let it happen. I have found, over the course of about a decade, that if I let my monkey brain indulge periodically, the disciplined mind has a much better chance taking control the next time around. Some days I find myself very productively flip-flopping between gaming and work. I've watched some of my peers take this too far in the wrong way, but for whatever reason I can keep it on rails.
> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now?
I have never, not ever, not once, felt excitement about doing taxes, or about reviewing a functional description, or any of the other necessary evils of my job.
Eventually you just gotta, though. If you only ever had to do things that were fun, it wouldn’t be called work.
It would be weird if there was no intelligence to e.g. how the chemical hijack of love relates to evolution. With how strong it is, and how unforgiving natural selection is, there must be a long-range correlation outside immediate perception similar to how flocks of animals know when it is time to migrate.
We definitely keep a lot of what we actually know about the environment out from our daily driver philosophy.
We need to think carefully before invoking natural selection too strongly. The fact that it has much less emphasis on activities taken on after we stop procreation is a huge blindspot for one thing.
Someone who invents the cure for cancer but has no children is considered a failure by natural selection. Someone who never contributes anything to society but has 15 kids is conversely considered a huge success.
Well in terms of evolution there needs to be a set of instructions that gets passed on. If those instructions can mutate, we have evolution. Perhaps it isn't genetic code that gets passed on, but e.g. cultural inventions.
That said, these biological circuits that we are considering get replicated in whatever environment that they exist in. Love may lead to other things than biological reproduction. Our lore regarding the human, personal experience of love and what to do with it also mutates and evolves. A poem then, may take the place of the greatest invention.
If they invent a cure and it's forgotten by future generations, then it is a failure. If their cure is remembered and passed on, then their memetic output is not lost, so they contributed - just not genetically.
Sure genetic material can survive where culture and memory is lost, and evolves more slowly, but cultural contributions do shape the future a lot as well.
Not at the macro level. Natural selection isn't just about fitness of an individual. For example, altruism can be selected for, despite resulting in the sacrifice of the individual. It increases the fitness of their kin by globally reducing risk. If you extend "kinship" to "all of humanity", then having a pool on non-reproducing scientists still increases the species' fitness.
I do the opposite for my cat. He's a very affectionate boy. He likes to sleep with us, but we'd prefer he didn't because we have a small bed and it makes our sleep worse. So, my solution was to snuggle with him on our guest bed a half hour or so before we go to bed. Then, when I get up, he stays on the guest bed and sleeps the rest of the night.
You might think that he might just do this out of habit now, but if we go out in the evening and come back late enough that he doesn't get his snuggle time, he almost always shows up on our bed after we've gone to sleep.
One thing that always freaks me out is how do you trust your cat to not scratch your face or maul your eyes out while you sleep (accidently or otherwise)?
You said the key word already: trust. Trust is earned over time, whether between humans or between cats and humans.
Growing up, I had a lot of cats around the house and now with a family of my own we have a pair of kitties. In many years of living with cats this has never been a problem. Our kitties have learned that they can trust us humans to be respectful, to treat them well, and to take care of them, and in return we trust that they won't randomly attack us.
Also, despite being solitary hunters, cats are actually social animals. They will learn to give and take social cues. At worst when I've annoyed a cat, they'll typically express it first by a light swat with sheathed claws; that's signal enough for me that they want to be left alone till they get over it.
(In practice, though, my biggest problem with cats on the bed is overheating; I woke up this morning with my feet sandwiched between our two cats.)
I've had a zoo of animals my whole life and never has this question entered my mind. The only animals I've had on my face while asleep are hamsters that would routinely find ways of escaping their cages and would come and run across my face as soon as they got out (I do not know why) and then I would wake up and spend an hour trying to coax them out of a hiding place to put them back.
With the three cats I've had living with me, the closest I've come to getting my face attacked while sleeping was sometimes they walk over me, which is fine when they walk over my legs or torso, and uncomfortable when they walk over my groin or face. Usually there's some amount of motion or noise so I can get my arms up to protect my face or at least move the cat.
I haven't had the types of cats that just attack their owners with no provocation though. All three did have the thing where sometimes they get upset by something that is impercetible to humans and swat at apparently nothing and then run away. That's not usually too stealthy though, and you can usually avoid getting attacked in the face.
Of all the cats I've known over the decades, I've only ever known one that would curl up on top of someone's face while that person was sleeping (not my cat). That cat did cause quite a bit of trauma on multiple occasions, but I believe my friends found a solution for that. At certain times, I believe that my friend was woken up by his wife struggling to breathe, and so he picked up the cat and tossed it across the room. Do that a few times, and I think the cat tends to learn.
Of the cats I've actually had myself, only one of them has ever shown any interest in attacking anything related to our faces. It was actually rather terrifying to see the look on her face when she was a tiny kitten, and she spotted her reflection in our eyeballs for the first time. This was clearly a toy she needed to play with. But those damn glasses were in the way, so she had to try to bite them and pull them off. It took us a while, but we discovered that she didn't like puffs of air being blown into her face, so we used that technique to disabuse her of any notion of that kind.
We don't allow the current crop to sleep with us at night, but that was more because as kittens they needed to get used to the new room and the new house after we adopted them, and we have too much junk on the floor of our master bedroom, and we didn't want them climbing under the bed and getting covered in dust bunnies, or maybe peeing on the stuff on the floor, or whatever. These are our first cats we've ever had that we have not allowed to sleep with us at night.
Frankly, the problem of cats sleeping on our face or attacking our face is just not a problem we've ever really had to deal with, over the many different cats we've had over the decades.
Cats can be very affectionate. I have three cats and they all jockey to get in my lap whenever I'm sitting or lay on my stomach if I'm reclining reading a book.
People who know cats as unkind typically have only met cats unknown to them.
All of the cats I've ever had over the past forty plus years, have all been relatively affectionate, and most of them have been very affectionate. Sleeping on the bed wasn't a problem for most of them, but I was rather surprised when some decided they wanted to burrow all the way under the sheets to the bottom of the bed, or waking up to cold wet nose in the ear.
That's about the worst feline generated behaviour I've ever personally witnessed with our cats.
Cats do treat humans as play partners, and frequently scratch the hands and legs in such activity. But I've never experienced more than a boop on the face, from something like five cats (across decades).
I think there is some truth in what stevage said. Usually when we come home the cats get up and are unsettled due to the change in routine. I try to get them settled on the guest bed again before going to bed myself, but this doesn't always work if they're really amped up. If I am able to get them settled, he won't sleep with us (the other cat isn't as interested in sleeping with us), but, if I can't, he'll likely show up in our bed later.
So, it is likely just a matter of getting him comfortable sleeping somewhere warm so that he isn't interested in moving to our bed.
Edit: Having said that, before I started this routine, he _would_ come up to bed if he was sleeping somewhere else already on a normal night in. So, I don't know.
There's a folk belief (or maybe a legend of such belief) that when moving into a new house, one should let in the cat first, observe where they choose the resting place, and promptly install the bed there.
I guess those people restricted the cat to the bedroom in the experiment, because the instruction mentioned the ‘corner’ where the cat rests, not just any place. Conveniently in this context, though, olden rural houses here mostly just had one big room, due to heating considerations in the northern winters—so no plopping down in the middle of the bathroom like with some cats I know. While in the OP, the practice was compromised by grossly differing dimensions of the cat and the woman.
There's a folk belief (or maybe a legend of such belief) that when moving into a new house, one should let in the cat first, observe where they choose the resting place, and promptly install the bed there.
It's a very sensible belief! Cats are quite sensitive to drafts, so (especially in days when houses were draftier and lacked central heating) sleeping in the location the cat picks is likely to be much healthier than picking a location at random.
My cats would have been insane guides for bed placement.
They largely gravitated to wherever the sun shined the most on the floor, and one of them liked to jump into the fridge and nap in there. It was a fun party trick to have a cat abruptly push open and exit the refrigerator in the middle of dinner or a board game, but clearly not the best guide for where to put the bed.
There is a similar folk belief to determine where to build a house. If you have a plot of land, have a herd of sheep graze there. The spot they choose to sleep is where you should build your house.
This of course assumes that you have a large enough plot of land, and no zoning laws telling you where you can and can't build.
I think we can confidently say it also requires having a flock of sheep or being able to borrow one for a day or so. Sheep as a Service for those of us who don't have a flock of our own?
I wonder if there's any correlation between sheep grazing locations and actual desirable features for building?
My intuition says sheep would graze where the grass is greenest, which if it's like my property would be where the soil keeps water for longer after a rain, which would decidedly be a bad spot to try to set my foundation. But I don't necessarily live in the climate or a similar geological area where this folk belief originated, so now I'm curious.
Does her cat not consistently sleep in her bed? Both now and with the multiple generations of cats I grew up with, they would come sleep between my legs almost every night. For some of them, they would already be there when I get to bed, and come get me if I'm up too late. Maybe they were running the experiment on me...
My previous cats all did that and I loved it. Weirdly, our newest cat prefers to sleep on my chest right up by my face. She has trained me to like it and before she started doing it I normally could not even sleep on my back. The only annoyance is that she occasionally will wake me up by lightly clawing my lip. Then just stare at me like, “why’d you wake up?”
Weirdly, it’s a hallmark of Western civilization to domesticate tons of animals. Compared to say indigenous North America. Maybe white folks have an animal obsession in their DNA.
We have four cats and one of them very much wants to be in the bed with me on a nightly basis. The other ones also do, to some extent, but the one that I let in will destroy things in an attempt to enter if the door is closed.
Once in, she's polite and sleeps at the end of the bed or on my legs if she's feeling a bit more affectionate that night. I don't mind having her in the bed.
Two of the remaining three are No Fun to have around when I'm trying to sleep. One will wake up very early and start knocking things off of my night stand in an attempt to get me to feed her. The other one will go into POWER GROOMING mode as soon as he gets into the bed. It's loud, his breath isn't the best, and he won't stop. He grooms himself, thoroughly, for what seems like an eternity. To save myself the headache, I just kick these two out and they will find somewhere else to sleep.
The last one doesn't come upstairs often, but he's not annoying to have around when he does.
It's easy to say that "a cat is a cat" but they really do have their own habits and personalities.
For a while I used to have 4 kittens sleep on the bed with me. Man, was I super careful. I didn't have to be as cautious when it was just their mother next to me
One of my cats does the same. How does this affect your sleep? I have to turn left/back/right every so often in my sleep, and it disturbs the cat, and then me.
Were your cats raised in a househould with a dog? I have only had one cat (bengal) that sleeps in my bed and it was. I've read it really helps cats be more outgoing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG0S5NzWrLo
Also, it being cold in the house seems to have a big impact too.
My cat likes to fall asleep at the foot of my bed every night... until we fall asleep. Then he gets up and move somewhere he likes better, usually his cat tower.
Her being Japanese and being used to sleeping essentially on the floor certainly helped. Pretty sure the result would have been different for us westerners being used to sleep in soft beds.
Couldn't help but laugh out loud when seeing the pictures. Especially since I thought at first it's about the cat lying on different spots on the bed, which can restrict your movement.
Are you a time traveler from the 1940s?
You'd be shocked to find out that the norm for modern Japanese people is to sleep in beds, sit on chairs, wear Western clothing, are able to use knives and forks, and watch "Bachelor"-type reality TV shows.
I'd wager that Japanese people still sleeping on the floor (which in itself is a falsehood, a futon is basically a thin mattress) are a very small minority.
Most Japanese people I know go to Ryokan's as a fun way to feel "like people from ages ago", but the next day at breakfast they all complain how much their bodies hurt from not sleeping in their beds.
Well, I have lived for 6 months in the Kansai region and also had a very nice guest family that I met at least every second weekend, also multiple times in their house. They certainly didn't have beds and the futon they used definitely would not have counted as a proper mattress for me. Maybe you draw your conclusions based on observations in Tokyo (westernization is on another level there after all, which is why I personally didn't enjoy Tokyo so much), but as another commenter linked about 50% of Japan still sleeps on futons (2014) and it was even 75% in 1990.
Also, you could avoid the condescending tone. Especially since your argument is wrong. Adding that time traveling accusation and other examples of common westernization was unnecessary to make your point.
6 months, so you're basically a tourist, and have one piece of anecdotal evidence. Yet you wrote as if you have deep experience of modern Japanese culture - any sort of condescension was warranted.
Man your attitude is really unwarranted. Not the kind of comments and discourse one likes to have here.
I provided anecdotal evidence (which I added because the tone of your comment provoked me to give evidence that I actually do have some relevant experience and certainly didn't time travel to 1940) and statistics that your claim "a very small minority" is wrong. Here is the link from a sister comment providing the data I spoke about:
Japanese people don't typically sleep on the floor, though they may sleep on mattresses placed on the floor (rather than suspended by a bedframe and box spring).
Sleeping on a futon (thick blanket, not a mattress) on the floor is pretty typical. Apparently bed vs floor is about half and half (blue is floor and red is mattress in this chart). [1]
Of Japan's population of roughly 127 million, about 118 million of them live in urban/suburban areas.
Hosei University, where this researcher is from, is in Tokyo.
So in absolute terms the statement that "The majority of Japanese people sleep in beds" is certainly correct. In context of the article, where it is being claimed that sleeping on a futon on top of a tatami mat is preparation for sleeping on the floor (and really, it isn't, but we'll ignore that), it is also valid. The majority of the Japanese populace in Japan sleeps on beds, and this researcher likely does as well.
From anecdotal experience, most modern homes I have been in in Japan have only one, if any, tatami rooms. They are not used as bedrooms, except perhaps in the 'family having a sleepover in the tatami room' sort of fashion. Modern apartments seem to have none.
Yup, I know, but it's far from uncommon though. By population, beds win, but by the area covered I'll bet futons still win (everywhere outside of major cities).
The poster you’re responding to said “essentially” on the floor. Having stayed at a traditional ryokan I’d say that’s an accurate description. It’s a very comfortable floor! But very different from western beds.
> Pretty sure the result would have been different for us westerners being used to sleep in soft beds.
A couple of nights on a hard surface will get your body used to it. (Or at least, it did for me, when I rented an apartment where the previous occupant had outfitted the bed with a board to make it harder. I hurt all over after the first night. But I got used to it.)
In my case, when I moved into a new apartment and was waiting on new furniture, I never got used to it. Yes, the first few nights were the most challenging, but the challenge never abated. Over a couple of months I tossed and turned way too often as a result of too much pressure in one spot or another and I started to develop rather consistent back pain almost daily as a result of this arrangement.
Is there a benchmark on how accurate fitness trackers are with sleep? I didn't get over the fact that my Fitbit I got a year back isnt as good as the 4x cheaper Honor band it replaced. It tracks lying consciously after sleep as sleep.
It is rumoured that if you give a person enough alcohol they too will be able to access their inner cat-based mechanism for choosing slumber locations!
The most amazing thing to me is how a deeply sleeping cat can go from comatose to actively engaging in a task in a matter of a second if it is disturbed to the point of awakening. It’s truly incredible. My anecdotal understanding is that the closest humans can get to this kind of feline state of ready alertness is in war time, but I think that has more to do with sleep deprivation.
That's a sweet article, but probably those findings relate to the age of the person doing the studying. A good bed should support your spine so that it is aligned while sleeping, and the comfort layer needs to allow for circulation to occur in the tissue you are lying on. If these factors are not correct you'll wake up with back pain, or poorly rested (due to excessive movement overnight to relieve poor circulation). I'm surprised they didn't find a worsening of sleep quality not sleeping on their bed.
We have a cat and she definitely shifts her sleeping place every few days/week. Another theory I have is that it is a natural way of managing fleas, which will die off with no animal sleeping in the spot for several days.
This! I know for a fact that my cat changes sleeping places if he detects fleas and will not move back to the old spot for a couple of weeks. Flea management from a cat perspective.
If I'm sleeping accessible to the cats, it means I fell asleep in an armchair (horrible bastard cat papa doesn't let Mr Sneezy the Hair Chewer in the bedroom) and the preferred feline sleep location is curled up on a blanket on my lap.
That or curled up on top of the Comcast box (DVR?) which might possibly have a larger cardboard box on top of it to provide a comfy warm spot....
"For example, the researcher’s journal often described feelings of excitement and adventure in not knowing where she would be sleeping that night."
I will attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail this year. So I'll be sleeping at a different place almost every night for almost 5 months. Will I sleep better?
Depends. The continuous northbound party crowd sometimes stays up later than other folks might like. If you're in a shelter with somebody who snores loudly it can be iffy (earplugs weigh nothing. My favorites are the Howard Leight MAX with a cord. If you're a back sleeper, you can probably be less picky and go with a more rigid option). Occasionally the ground is so wretched that it'll screw up your sleeping (hammockers have different problems, but I tented, so I can't speak to that personally). Some people report shelter mice keeping them up. I've not had that experience. The foul weather rule for shelters is "there's always room for one more". That sometimes means everybody is crammed in and if one person moves, it turns into a Newton's cradle situation.
Also, I don't know how old you are, but I've found the shelter floors have gotten a lot harder as I've gotten older. What I slept well enough, but not quite comfortably on on a Z-rest at 20 is now something I need a NeoAir (or equivalent) to get a good night of sleep and not wake up with lumps on my hips from the hard floor. The ground is much softer unless it's hard-packed mineral soil.
Apart from those things and the occasional storm, etc, you can pretty much count on sleeping like you're dead.
By coincidence the cat was also doing a study trying to predict where the human would sleep that night, and going there first. Got it right 100% of the time.
Very amusing. Though, she concludes there's no difference based on average sleep quality, but the variance is sizably larger, and I personally care quite a bit about sleep quality consistency.
From reading the title I expected it to be a study along the lines of “if your cat decides to sleep on your face, then your sleep will be of lesser quality than if it decides to sleep at the foot of the bed.”
There is nothing scientific about this "study". But another good example of what I call the "Cargo cult science" approach so often found in Japan: "We use meters to collect data and make graphs and wear lab coats, so we're doing the science!"
It's like the Japanese watched a movie of scientists doing science, and just recreated what they saw without understanding anything that goes on beyond the surface.
Why is this not science? No control group, no elimination of millions of variables that could affect the animal's choice of location, etc.
Is it news or post worthy, is what I am questioning. I reckon the reason this got posted here is the popularity of all things Japan on dweeb boards like this one.
