My Cat wakes me up in the middle of the night EVERY night. HELP!

My 2 years old cat Pepper wakes my husband and I up in the middle of the night, EVERY night. He will start to scratch the curtains, which are now pretty much destroyed or he will sit on the floor by the door crying. This has been going on as long as I can remember. I use to feed him and obviously this would only encourage his middle of the night begging. We stopped doing that and would just place him in his room and shut the door. This would keep him calm for a while until he would begin to scratch at the door. We would have to shut out the bedroom door and turn the fan up to drown out his meowing and scratching. We have tried playing with him a bunch before bed to see if that would tire him out but that only worked for a couple hours, instead of 2am he would wake us up at 4am. We take him to the vet regularly and he always comes back with a clean bill of health. We have thought about an automatic feeder, but we are concerned about him over eating because we do have another cat, Freya, who eat at the same time he does. She is only 8 months and she doesn't wake us up at night except to cuddle.

Any ideas? My husband and I are having a very hard time sleeping at night because of Pepper. 

Has anyone tried Night Owl Solution from Spirit Essences? Or any other kind of natural approach. I really don't like locking him up at night, especially because we also have to lock up Freya who usually hasn't done anything. Is the automatic feeder the answer? 

Any suggestion would be very helpful. Thank You. 

I very tired cat lover, 

Julie


Pepper Allen

So sorry you're struggling with this. Have both of your cats been fixed?

Yes both have been fixed before we adopted them. 

Sounds like your cat is being a cat. 

Cats are crepuscular, which is Latin for "Twilight". Basically cats are mainly active at dawn and dusk. 

If possible, try to keep them awake during the day. I may sound mean but sometimes I will go out of my way to wake my cats up from napping =)

Keep playing with them to tire them out. Try not to feed him first thing in the morning and please stop feeding in the middle of the morning. 

My neighbor's cat, little Amber pumpkin, does this all the time when she stays with us when we cat sit. She usually wakes us up because she wants to go outside and we don't have a cat door so have to get up and let her out. 

Mostly we just put up with it and try to ignore her since giving her attention just encourages her behavior. Problem is the neighbours get up and let her out when she wakes them so its not going to progress much unfortunately.

One thing that helps I think is playing with her at night before we go to bed basically to tire her out. Might want to give that a try as well as the previous suggestion to try keeping her awake during the day more.

If you don't free feed, she might be getting hungry during the night, try feeding her later in the evening (but not too close to playtime so her stomach doesn't get upset).

Update: We now have an article on this very topic -
How To Stop My Cat From Waking Me Up At Night?

I'm sorry to hear he's being such a rascal though. The good news is that this can be solved! In fact, it's one of my favorite cat behavior problems to deal with because it's often fairly easy to solve.

As you rightfully guessed, you've trained him well in the past by feeding him when he woke you up. You've created a habit using one of the most effective tools for behavior modification (yes, bribing with treats is very effective ). Let's see how you can change the pattern into something that's easier to live with.

You mentioned that he's neutered which is great. For anyone else reading this, neutering is something that has to be done if you want to have a well-behaved male cat. It's great that he has a clean bill of health too. It means we can move on to behavioral modification.

First, you need to establish your rules now by addressing two specific issues:

1. Decide on your the hours you wish to designate as "sleep time". It has to be your decision and only once that's settled, you can start training him to recognize and respect those time boundaries. It can be anything that works for you and it's best if you can keep it consistent at least for a few weeks (i.e. including weekends and holidays). Set up your timer for bedtime and for wakeup time.

2. Decide on whether or not Pepper is allowed in your bedroom at night. Most cat lovers enjoy sharing the bed with their cats and that's perfectly ok. However if one of the humans is a light sleeper and prefers not to have Kitty in the bed that's perfectly ok as well. It's your choice and you need to find a good balance that works for everyone involved. The cat is the easier party to please here and will get used to your rules. (I know, it sounds odd to some cat owners, but honestly, it's true. You can read more about the general concept here: [article="32827"]How To Set Healthy Boundaries For Your Cat[/article] ).

Now, to your action plan

1. Make sure Pepper has enough stimulation during the day. Cats need that, and at two years of age, he needs a LOT of it. Here are some suggestions for creating a stimulating environment for an indoors-only cat -

[article="22426"]Beating Boredom What Indoor Cat Owners Need To Know[/article]

[article="22537"]Keeping Indoor Only Kitties Happy[/article]

2. More specifically, designate a time each evening for interactive playtime. The idea is to keep him up and active. This should be happening 1-2 hours before your bedtime. Here's how to conduct an interactive playtime session -

[article="32656"]Playing With Your Cat 10 Things You Need To Know[/article]

3. End the play session with a meal. If you feed a mix of dry and wet, this would be a good time for his daily wet food meal (or one of them).

4. If he has no special dietary issues, do leave some dry food out for him to nibble overnight.

5. And now to the most important part and one that some owners find difficult. I promise this stage is going to be shorter than you think -

Once your timer says it's bedtime, you and your partner must go to bed. I don't care if you fall asleep or not, but you need to try and you need to keep your eyes shut. From this minute on, you ignore Pepper 100% until the timer says it's wake-up time. I mean 100%. If you decided to let him be in the room, that's fine. If he's outside your door, that's ok too. Either way, you do not respond to his vocalizations, scratching, or any type of behavior. If he's in the room, you're going ot have to avoid responding even to him biting on your toes. Nothing happens no matter what he's trying. If he's outside the door, it's easier but you must not even whisper to each other or laugh. Zero response. You are only allowed to respond once the alarm says it's wake up time. Once that happens, feel free to be as loving to him as possible. He is not being punished in any way, you are just helping him set up a new routine.

In my experience, it rarely takes more than three nights for a cat to realize that things have changed. Most cats figure it out after a couple of nights and stop trying. As long as he has plenty of stimulation, enrichment and interaction with you during the day, he's going to be perfectly ok with letting you guys sleep at night. Please remember every step matters. Don't skip any of these steps and make it your project for three nights exactly. You absolutely should continue to make sure he's got enough stimulation and it's always good to keep the interaction playtime sessions as well but after a week or two, you can start making them shorter and possibly take days off (don't stop all at once though, make it a gradual process).

Remember, you're going to have a hard time for 1-2 nights but it won't be any worse than what is already happening and following that, you should have the nights back for yourselves.

Good luck and let us know how it's going!

What about a puzzle feeder or interactive feeder? Then he'll be fed, but he'll have to work to get each kibble out. That can keep cats entertained and quiet for hours!

Our cat used to wake us up around 4am every morning. We had to ignore ignore ignore and play dead until our alarm went off. Eventually she got the point and stopped, but she did still cry for food at around 5:30am. She has a very specific "I'm Hangry!" cry.

She LOVES eating and constantly begs for food during the day, but she stops asking for food after her dinner at 6:30pm. She gets into an extreme acrobatic play session of running around, climbing and chase the mouse at around 9pm for up to an hour then passes out. So by 5:30am, she is truly hungry and not just begging for our attention. That was fine, I'll take a 5:30am wake up call over 4am any day.

However, there are days when we're exhausted from working too much and too late into the night that even 5:30am is too early to get out of bed. We couldn't get her a puzzle feeder because she'd find it and just gobble up all the contents as soon as we set it down somewhere. She's not the kind of cat who can leave food and come back to it later when she's less full. She'll eat every last crumb of anything we put down whether she's hungry or full, so timed and portion controlled meals are crucial for her. 

We broke down and got her an automatic feeder. The reason I hesitated for so long is that I always wanted to feed her mostly wet food with the occasional dry treats. With this particular feeder, I can only fill it with dry food, but I figure one small meal of high quality kibble won't be so bad if the rest of her diet is wet food. Now it's set to open at 5:15am every morning, and she no longer needs us so badly in the morning. 

I'm guessing you sleep with your door closed? Maybe he just wants to be close to you? Unless I'm wrong about the door closed.

I keep mine open and it is rare for me to sleep all the way through the night. My cats go into tornado mode in the middle of the night quite often, or go crawling around. God forbid I hear one of them jump on the TV, because I know the very next thing they'll try to do is walk on the curtain rod, which is already bent down from the weight they put on it. That will wake me up IMMEDIATELY.

And then there's the fact I keep the fourth litter box in my room. I swear it sounds like they are peeing on something else when they pee (like plastic) and I wake up from that. But no, they're not, they're in the litter box.

@Anne has a lot of great tips.  One other thing I would add is to get into a routine and stick with it.  Cats thrive on routine.  Have a big play session before bed, feed him a nice wet food serving, then turn out the lights and go to bed.  This mimics the cat's natural play, eat, sleep rhythm.

All such good advice! 

Here's some micro-pieces of advice, that seem to work with Grizzly:

1. I don't free-feed him - He eats at a certain schedule each day. The only bowl that is constantly available is his water.
2. Right before bed I give him a good portion of wet-food (along with a treat sometimes) - This helps to make him lick himself to sleep easier afterwards 
   
3. I noticed that he likes to take a a loooong nap between 20:00 - 23:00. So I try to either keep him busy or make noise so that he doesn't go into deep sleep. Sometimes, when I have stuff to do and I want him out of the way, it serves me, but he gives me hell at about 03:00 in the morning - so this doesn't happen often.
4. When the above don't work, I just bore him to death. He howls and he yells, tries to make me play with him, while it's like 01:00 in the morning (but I'm still up) and the creepy-misanthropic guy leaving under us is sleeping 
   
   , so what I do is ignore him, avoid eye contact and he usually ends up sitting beside me, looking at what I do, until he's too bored to deal with me..

So, the above 4 tips result to the following result: when he sees me getting ready to go to bed for the night, he automatically positions himself in his (well-claimed) bed, which is my desk chair (right beside my bed). He is watching me long enough to know that I have closed my eyes and gone to sleep. So, he settles down and goes to sleep. In the morning, he either sleeps or watches me sleeping without making a sound, until I wake up. On the other hand, he sometimes beats me to it - he is gone to sleep before I do. 

After I wake up, hell breaks loose, of course 

I have almost the same problem with this girl It is very difficult to be awake all night..

Mine is also not spayed yet:/

So did any of this work for you, Julie?  Our cat is waking me up in the morning, too.  I've already tried a lot of these suggestions, without any luck so far.  I'm desperate for a solution!