As a teen, I hated making my bed.
To be fair, that was only because my mom would always tell me I didn’t do it right. The pillows weren’t properly fluffed. There was a slight wrinkle between the quilt and comforter. And… did that sheet look even to me? Did it? Did it?! Thus, for a while, I rebelled once I got to college. Unmade beds and unkempt rooms were my way of embracing the entropy. Until I started feeling it affect my mood, motivation, and – ultimately – studies. Once I resumed a routine of orderliness (with no one to chastise me about how crooked my comforter was), the academic atmosphere improved right along with it. And that kept on into my professional life as well. However, according to research, those of us aiming for morning orderliness could be fostering filth in the process. Because it’s been shown that making your nap craft every morning might encourage mites to grow – just as much as it encourages your personal growth. What happens is that these mini monsters who thrive off your dead skin get cocooned up in the freshly fitted fabric you’ve wrapped around them. And that means they don’t die because your bed’s not ventilated. And that means they can breed.
Now, it might seem kinda gross, but this doesn’t deter me from dressing my naked bed back up every morning.
Why? Because, for one, scientific findings also have shown that tidying up your slumber lair helps set your day by plunging you into productivity mode, makes you happier and more successful, and lowers stress. (Anyone else get depressed coming home to a mess after work?) Secondly, I’m sorry to say it, but you’re gonna have some degree of microbial bedmates unless maybe you do your dozing in a morgue drawer. So that I’m never gonna commit mass bug-icide on every member of my mattress by picking up some paradoxical OCD proclivity for disarray. (Plus: ever heard of the too clean theory?)
(Well, impossible to get rid of ’em all at least. Read on for mite management.)
And that leads me to point three, which maybe will also help you bridge the gap between your need to clear out the critters – versus your desire for tidiness. And that’s just to maybe make your bed a little later, if you’d like to mitigate the mite levels. Get up, do your yoga, make your coffee, take a shower – and then you can crease your cradle’s sheets to your heart’s content. Why do this? ’cause (and I actually didn’t know this til today), mites are vampires. They dine on your remnants left at night and die in daylight. (And atmospheric air exposure.) Which means the halfway happy medium would be to draw up the shades and let your mattress catch a tan for a few hours after waking. Finally, the fourth reason to eschew this silly notion of leaving my sheets strewn about is the same reason I make my bed in the first place: that first thing – de-lazy-fying myself. Now that I know these skin feasting creatures are having orgies after I tuck ’em in each A.M., it’ll force me to launder my linens more frequently. And, loathsome though laundry day might be, it’s a good feeling once the job’s done.
Almost as good as the one you get after making your bed every morning.