Does making your bed in the morning matter?
70% of Americans make their beds. While it may seem like an unnecessary task to add to your morning ritual, it’s an easy way to enhance your daily routine and improve your quality of life! Making your bed improves your sleep hygiene and has other lasting impacts on your health, happiness, productivity, and sleep!
What are the benefits of making your bed?
Making your bed can yield greater quality of sleep, create a more positive mindset, increase productivity and focus, improve organization, lower stress and chaos in your environment, and help encourage and lead to other good habits.
This small morning ritual takes only 2 minutes and helps you feel more organized and productive first thing in the morning. It’s a great way to set the tone for your day and give you some peace of mind when you admire your efforts in the evening! Reducing clutter in your bedroom helps clear your mind of excess stress and maintain control over your space.
Additionally, maintaining healthy habits like making your bed every day can encourage you to add other quick self care tasks to your morning todos! Once you incorporate easy tasks into your morning routine, it’s much easier to add in another few minutes tidying up other areas of your bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and more.
How does making your bed improve your mental health?
If getting out of bed is hard enough for you, making your bed might feel like an unnecessary extra step once you’re ready to start your day. However, completing these small tasks can help you feel accomplished earlier in the day, so you can feel like you’re taking steps to establish a solid and consistent self-care routine. These kinds of routines are very important in helping manage depression and other mental health issues.
Making your bed as a part of your morning ritual makes it easier to resist the temptation to climb back in. This small act keeps you out of bed in the morning and the rest of the day when you might feel the urge to lay down again. This way you are already on a better path to productivity where you can leave the bedroom clean, made, and fresh for when you get to crawl under the covers at the end of the day.
How does making your bed lead to better productivity?
Accomplishing one small self-care task in the morning allows your brain to get dopamine from a productive action, rather than finding dopamine from checking your phone or other screens. It can also encourage you to continue taking care of other small tasks that you may be putting off, like putting away clothes, doing some dishes, or taking care of other mini messes.
According to Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit,” daily bed-making can be a keystone habit, a small task that encourages the continuation of other good, productive habits throughout the rest of your day. These keystone habits can contribute to a greater sense of well-being and stronger decision making skills.
What does making your bed say about your personality?
While your bed-making preferences aren’t necessarily a personality indicator, a OnePoll study which surveyed 2000 Americans found that people who make their bed are more likely to:
- Be a morning person
- Wake up without, or before their alarms
- Be adventurous, confident, sociable, and high-maintenance
- Rise 16 minutes earlier on average
Whereas those who don’t make their beds were more likely to:
- Be a night person
- Hit snooze on their alarm clocks
- Be shy, moody, curious, and sarcastic
- Report a lower quality of sleep
How does your sleep benefit from making your bed?
The National Sleep Foundation found that people who make their bed get better rest as they are able to enjoy the benefits of a more tidy, organized bedroom and sleep environment. Perfecting your bedroom for better sleep is a big element of sleep hygiene, which involves setting healthy habits for your sleep routine and environment in order to set yourself up for the most successful, quality rest.
Studies have shown optimal bedroom environments have clear impacts on our quality of sleep. When your noise, temperature, cleanliness, light and comfort levels are all ideal in your sleep environment, your quality of sleep and average duration improve easily. A 2012 survey from the National Sleep Foundation reported that respondents who made their bed several times a week, if not daily, were 19% more likely to sleep better every night, and even fall asleep faster.
How else can you improve your sleep hygiene?
Making your bed is just one way to improve your quality of sleep and overall wellness. Other ways to improve your sleep hygiene, including setting a sleep schedule, establishing nightly routines, making changes to your daily habits and lifestyle, and setting up your bedroom environment for the best sleep possible. Learn more about ways to improve your sleep hygiene from our blog.
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