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When Your Cat Wakes You Up

How to curb your cat’s early morning antics.
By Roxanne Hawn
WebMD Pet Health Feature
Reviewed by Audrey Cook, BVM&S

Romeo, a Persian cat and star of the cat humor blog “Romeo The Cat,” is famous for his early morning wake-up tactics. Here are just a few, documented by Caroline Golon, Romeo’s "chief of staff":

  • Alternately meowing at Golon and her husband
  • Flipping laundry baskets
  • Breathing loudly in Golon’s ear
  • Sitting on her head

Recently, Romeo made an ill-planned leap and landed belly first on Golon’s face. “Romeo is usually on the bed all night long,” she says. “That’s the funny part about it. He loves to sleep, but in the morning he is ready to go.”

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Why do cats wake us up? How do we accidentally reward them for doing so? What steps prevent or fix feline habits that ruin a good night’s sleep?

Wired to Wake You Up?

“I think cats are cooperative and nice about how often they try to complement our schedules,” says Pam Johnson-Bennett, certified cat behavior consultant and author of several books, including Psycho Kitty: Tips for Solving Your Cat’s “Crazy” Behavior.

However, left home alone all day with nothing to do except sleep, cats will be more active at night.

That's nothing new. African wildcats, the presumed ancestor of today’s domestic cats, hunt primarily at night -- but that doesn’t mean modern housecats are also staunchly nocturnal. Our feline friends do respond to certain cues at dusk and dawn, but cat behavior researchers have found that feral cats or domestic cats adapt their activity cycles to food sources or human activity.

In other words, the environment dictates cat behavior, so we cannot blame cats’ nighttime and early morning activities entirely on a feline internal clock.

“The biggest myth is that cats cannot be trained and that you cannot change these things,” says Johnson-Bennett, who is based in Nashville. “This can be a real deal breaker for people, if their cat keeps waking them up at night. It can drive them to lock the cat out of the room, put the cat outside, or relinquish them to the shelter for something that can be changed.”

This behavior takes root in boredom. Many cats live a lonely, boring life, with families gone all day and asleep all night.

“We say that we need to keep cats indoors because it’s safer,” says Valarie Tynes, DVM, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist in Sweetwater, Texas. “As we’ve promoted this indoor lifestyle, we forget about how much we’ve taken away from cats.”

Cats Gambling for Attention

By waking you up, your cat achieves certain goals:

  • Making something exciting happen, even if it’s only grumbling or movement
  • Getting social interaction, especially if you respond in any way
  • Receiving food

“The cat meows for food, so you get up and throw some food in the bowl so that you can go back to bed. What you’ve done is cemented that behavior,” Johnson-Bennett says. “Even if you wait as long as you possibly can, the cat just thinks, ‘Well, that took a ridiculous amount of time, but she finally got up and fed me.'”

This process - called intermittent reinforcement - mirrors the way slot machines work, according to Katherine Miller, PhD, a certified applied animal behaviorist with the ASPCA. “If you pull that handle 50 times, and the slot machine pays off, then next time you’re going to be willing to pull it at least 51 times, or 52, or 100 times before you start to think it isn’t paying off,” she says. “So, the delayed gratification can actually reinforce the behavior more than immediate gratification.”

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