A Doctor Explained The Sound Logic For Not Making The Bed In The Morning

We don’t feel much more at ease than when we’re laying back in our beds. It’s an anchor, somewhere to return to after experiencing the stresses and strains of daily life. We want it to be a relaxing and comfy space, obviously, but the way to achieve that might actually be fairly counterintuitive.

You’d expect that making our beds would be a good thing, though. After all, most of us are taught to do so from an early age and it just feels right. Surely if the duvet’s all bunched up and the pillows are mislaid, that can’t be optimal? It must be better to make it up all nice and tidy. Well, perhaps not.

Dr. Karan Raj is a doctor in the United Kingdom who works for the country’s health service. That’s his day job, anyway, and he also has something of a side hustle. He’s a bit of a TikTok celebrity, having amassed millions of followers who’re interested in hearing any medical tips he’s willing to share.

Among the tips Dr. Raj has shared with his followers are his ideas on sleeping. Most of us don’t think very much about our habits in this regard but the doctor’s encouraging us to be more mindful of how we do things. And unexpectedly, in contrast to many people’s instincts, he says we need to stop making our beds.

Lots of people may look at Dr. Raj’s assertion and just dismiss it. After all, a tidy bed helps us sleep better, doesn’t it? It certainly feels that way for a lot of people and there are even statistics to back up this belief. According to a National Sleep Foundation survey, those who make the bed at the start of the day will probably get a better night’s sleep come bedtime.

Millions of people experience the misery of a sleep disorder of one kind or another, and many of them will do anything to make things easier. Not getting enough shuteye, after all, is incredibly bad for us. If there’s any chance at all that making a bed helps us to drift off, then it’s surely worth doing it.

There’s a concept known as “sleep hygiene” that’s useful to consider when deciding how to arrange our beds and bedrooms. If a person has bad sleep hygiene, that means their nighttime environment isn’t optimal. It’ll be full of distractions, things that emit light or make noise. Or, maybe, it’s too messy.

So, following this logic, keeping your bedroom tidy would be considered good sleep hygiene. As, of course, would be making your bed. And plenty of people buy into this idea — some have even capitalized on it. A former Navy admiral named William H. McRaven’s actually written a book about the advantages of making your bed.

Writing in Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life... And Maybe the World, McRaven claimed this simple habit can bring success to our lives. That’s quite a statement but he says it’s true because it means we’ve already achieved something early in the morning. That minor accomplishment can then serve as a template for the rest of the day.

In 2014 McRaven delivered a speech about making the bed to the University of Texas. He stated, “It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.”

Whether you buy into McRaven’s claims is down to you and skeptics will certainly need convincing. To that end, there’s research that seems to suggest living in a tidy home is beneficial to people’s ability to focus and achieve their aims. These studies don’t necessarily talk about making the bed specifically but it stands to reason that having a tidy bed’s as important as anything else in the home.

According to some researchers, people who reside inside messy households may be more likely to struggle with high stress levels. Their mental health might take a hit, too, and their ability to deal with and work through information might be impaired. These are all pretty basic and important things to get right if we’re to live well.

Other research has suggested that older individuals in particular benefit from a tidy household, in that it helps their brains to function properly. And to look at that another way, we can say the opposite’s true. If more mature people live in a cluttered, topsy-turvy house, their well-being can be expected to take a knock.

Yet another study seems to suggest tidier people are better at keeping their impulses in check, at least compared with those who are messier. Orderly individuals are also apparently more attentive to social conventions and manners. Messier folk, on the other hand, may struggle to focus on things. Tidiness, it’d seem logical to conclude, is best.

The benefits of a clean, orderly household — and by extension a clean, orderly bed — seem to be clear. Yet there are still arguments to be made against doing up your bedsheets in the morning. That seems like a strange idea, admittedly, but some people think a mess is actually better for us.

How exactly could maintaining a messy bed be good, though? Such a notion just seems to go against everything we think we know about how clutter affects our minds. But maybe our minds shouldn’t be the prime consideration here. There are other things we need to think about.

Let’s turn to Dr. Karan Raj now, the TikToking doctor over in the U.K. In one of the many videos in which he delivers health tips, he speaks about our beds and the state he thinks they should be in. And his advice is surprising. “Stop making your bed first thing in the morning,” he suggests. “It’s going to make you healthy.”

How’s Dr. Raj come to this surprising conclusion, though? Well, it all has to do with dust mites. “Making your bed in the morning traps dust mites that have accumulated over night,” he explains. “These microscopic predators, which are less than a millimeter long, feed on the scales of human skin and thrive in moist environments.”

“When we sleep at night, our bodies become warm and sweaty, making them prime targets for these mites to feed on,” Dr. Raj continues. “They will leave behind excretions which can give us asthma or allergy-like symptoms. So making your bed in the morning traps all this moisture and provides a home for 1.5 million of these bad boys.”

The alternative, Dr. Raj suggests, is to leave our beds unmade. “[A messy bed] exposes these mites to air and sunlight, which dehydrate them and cause them to die,” he adds. And if you aren’t convinced by that, it does seem to be supported by research from 2006, which concludes that leaving a bed unmade will help the bed sheets “breathe.”

Another online celebrity’s been preaching a similar story, too. Mrs. D’s Cleaning Reviews is also a popular TikTok page, though it’s found on a bunch of other social media platforms as well. Basically, the eponymous Mrs. D makes content providing tips on maintaining a clean life. And as she says in one of her videos, “Get out of bed and throw the duvet back and let your bed breathe.”

The notion that dust mites may thrive in a neat bed’s actually quite convincing, once you listen to people such as Dr. Raj and Mrs. D discuss the creatures. But these tiny critters aren’t the only argument for not making a bed. A 2011 academic article from the Canadian Medical Association Journal, for instance, has presented another reason not to do it. This idea, though, might sound slightly ridiculous.

Basically, the article argues that it’s best not to make the bed because you might hurt yourself in the process. The text reads, “The very act of making a bed can adversely affect one’s health. Most beds are low to the floor and their attention requires constant lumbar flexion, predisposing to chronic low-back pain.”

All in all, then, it’d seem that Dr. Raj isn’t remotely alone in thinking a messy bed is best. And for what it’s worth, he has plenty of other health tips for his viewers. Not long before making the messy bed video, for instance, he released a clip in which he encouraged people to wear socks every time they go to bed. That advice perhaps seems even weirder than his suggestion not to make our beds.

In this other clip, Dr. Raj explains, “Wearing socks to bed increases the blood circulation to your feet [and] this causes your blood vessels to vasodilate — they widen. When the blood vessels widen they can get rid of heat much quicker because of the much bigger surface areas. This allows your core body temperature to cool down at a faster rate than normal, and a lower core body temperature is needed for optimal sleep. If you want better feet, cover your feet.”

And again, Dr. Raj’s unusual claim here’s been backed up by other experts in the field. This time, the support comes from the National Sleep Foundation, which appears to broadly agree with Dr. Raj’s assessment. If we’re to get the rest we need, it seems, warm feet at night really is the way to go.

In yet another of his clips, Dr. Raj makes a further controversial claim about the best sleeping habits we can adopt. And this one may upset those in relationships. Essentially, he suggests that sharing a bed with someone else is a bad idea. That’s because different people experience different sleep cycles — and they might not align with each other’s. This means one person can end up feeling rested, while the other’s left tired all the time.

“If the person next to you moves around or snores, that’ll stop you from getting into the deep stages of sleep your body needs to recharge, affecting sleep quality,” Dr. Raj elaborates. “One of the triggers you need to be able to fall asleep is the drop in core body temperature. Sharing a bed increases body heat so it’ll take longer for you to fall asleep.”

Whether or not it’s truly worth listening to Dr. Raj is probably up for debate. He’s a trained doctor, yes, but people have been sleeping in tidy beds, untidy beds, beds with partners, and beds without partners since time immemorial. Most of us have ended up getting through life okay, so maybe heeding the advice isn’t terribly necessary. But, equally, it might just be worth a shot.