Last Updated on June 22, 2026 by admin
You’ve seen it a hundred times. Your cat looks at you from across the room, then slowly closes its eyes and opens them again — unhurried, like it has all day. Most people read that as a sleepy cat.
It isn’t.
We assume a closing eye means drowsiness, because that’s what it usually means in us. So the slow blink gets filed under “cute, tired cat” and forgotten. But here’s the part owners miss: cats almost never close their eyes near something they don’t trust.
A closed eye is a defenseless eye. In the wild, shutting your eyes in front of a potential threat is the last thing you’d do. So when your cat deliberately powers down its eyes in your direction, it is making a statement.
That slow, lazy blink your cat gives you across the room is the closest thing cats have to saying “I trust you.” Behaviorists have a nickname for it — the “cat kiss.”
And this isn’t just feel-good folklore. In 2020, psychologists at the University of Sussex decided to test whether the slow blink was real communication, and they published their results in the journal Scientific Reports.
The team, led by Dr Tasmin Humphrey and Professor Karen McComb, ran two experiments. In the first, 14 owners slow-blinked at their cats — 21 cats in all, ranging from under a year old to sixteen.
The cats were significantly more likely to slow-blink back at an owner who had slow-blinked at them first than when the owner did nothing at all. The blink, it turned out, was a two-way conversation.
The second experiment is the one that surprised people. This time, complete strangers — researchers the cats had never met — slow-blinked at 24 different cats, then held out a hand.
The cats didn’t just blink back. They were more likely to approach the outstretched hand of a person who had slow-blinked than one who’d kept a neutral, blank face. A one-second eye movement made a stranger feel safe. You can read the University of Sussex’s write-up of the study here.
So what do you do with this?
Try it tonight. Catch your cat’s eye from a comfortable distance, relax the muscles in your face, and give a soft, slow blink — eyes closing for about a second, then opening again.
One rule matters more than any other: don’t stare. A hard, wide, unblinking gaze reads as a threat in cat language, which is exactly why a nervous cat will often make a beeline for the one person in the room ignoring it.
After your slow blink, just wait. Plenty of cats will return it within a few seconds — a slow blink of their own, or a soft narrowing of the eyes. As ScienceAlert noted in its coverage, the trick needs no treats, no training, and no special bond — it even works on a cat that isn’t yours.
Which means the next time you meet a shy cat hiding under a couch, you already know what to say. You say it with your eyes, slowly.
Try it tonight and tell us — did your cat blink back? 🐱