Cats are independent animals, which means they can be a lot more difficult to dicipline and train compared to other pets, such as dogs. However, it’s not impossible.
To help understand your feline friend, cat behaviourist Jackson Galaxy, who is famously known as the host of TV show ‘My Cat from Hell’ often takes to his social media to help fellow cat owners with any cat behavioural issues they might have.
Jackson famously advocates for replacing “no” with a “yes” when addressing unwanted cat behaviours, meaning you should provide an alternative that satisfies the cat’s needs instead of simply saying no. This approach focuses on understanding the cat’s motivations and redirecting them to acceptable behaviours. Instead of saying no to a cat, you should offer them a yes alternative.
Putting his theory into practice, he went on to share how you can use the yes/no theory to help stop your cat from disturbing your sleep and waking you up in the middle of the night.
“Does your cat wake you up in the middle of the night?” he wrote on the video before he jumped in to share his advice.
He went on to say: “The big no for all you guys, and that is your cat waking you up in the middle night. Because right now, what’s your no? Throwing something at them or whatever, or even worse than that, getting up and feeding them or playing with them or whatever at three o’clock in the morning and then complaining that you didn’t get enough sleep.”
“The ‘no’ in this case would be you completely ignoring them,” he said. “Burying your head, not saying their name, not getting up, not just in any way saying that this will get your something. The no in this case is nothing.”
He then went on to share the best way to stop this behaviour, which he said was to make sure to give your cat some attention before bed.
“The yes is everything that happens around bedtime, including a yes to a meal before they go to bed,” he said.
He went on to share some ideas of what to do, which included playing with you cat before going to bed and doing things that the cat likes to do, including giving them their last meal of the day right before bedtime so that they’re not waking you up from hunger.
He went on to say: “An hour before you go to bed, you start getting that body to wind down. It’s a whole world full of yes.”
“I’m telling you, this no/yes repeated over the span of let’s say ten days max, you will see a change in behaviour,” he told his viewers.
People quickly took to the comment section to praise Jackson for his advice, with many sharing their own experiences with their cats.
“I respect and appreciate you but my cat will burn my house down if I don’t wake up,” one viewer said, while a second person shared: “My cat screams for hours until I wake up and feed her. She also starts banging my door and knocking my things down, also slapping me in the face!”
“I pull them into a snuggle… they go away,” a third person wrote.
While another person added: “I’ve been doing that ever since mine was a kitten. She now sleeps the same amount as me right next to me in my bed. We both get up with my alarm or sleep in on the weekend.”