The importance of making your bed in the morning

I believe that the two-minute task of making your bed in the morning is enough to transform your entire day and possibly your life.

Background

I believe that making your bed is a habit that can be passed down through generations. More specifically, I think that I inherited this belief from my mother.

My mom has always been a very put-together woman who never leaves the house without her bed made, her hair blow-dried and her clothes ironed.

If I left to go to school without making my bed she wouldn’t let me do anything after school. I would first have to come home and make my bed with my bed skirt tucked in and my throw pillows in the right order.

While this may seem a little extreme and I did disagree with the notion in my younger years, I definitely understand her logic looking back.

Interestingly enough, my grandmother is also a firm advocate for bed-making and although I never met her, everyone has told me that my great-grandmother was the exact same way.

Accomplishments

Making your bed is a small accomplishment. Organizing the disheveled sheets and out-of-place pillows into a clean and put-together bed starts your day off with a success.

Completing this task will give you a small sense of pride and motivate you to complete another task, and another, and another. And, by the end of the day, making your bed will have turned into a list of accomplishments.

If making your bed isn’t enough to inspire achievements and you have a bad day, then at the very least you’ll still come home to a nicely made bed.

Productivity

A messy bed also symbolizes a messy mind. When your thoughts are in an array like the crumpled sheets and discarded pillows from your unmade bed, how could you possibly get work done?

A clean, put-together bed promotes productivity. If you leave your bedding in a messy heap then you tend to muddle through the day until it’s time to fall back into bed again.

I cannot count the number of times in my life that I have left without making my bed and come back to my room later with a long list of things to do that I simply couldn’t get through.

Perhaps it’s the allure of how quickly I could just crawl back into my unmade bed. Or maybe it’s the guilt of avoiding such an easy task, but once this happens I need to either make my bed or leave the room in order to actually get work done.

If you don’t believe me, feel free to ask my roommate who has frequently watched me leave our dorm room to do schoolwork if my bed was left unmade that morning.

Good habits

 Making your bed every morning is correlated with a greater sense of well-being, too. Somehow that initial shift starts a chain reaction that helps other good habits take hold.

Making your bed every morning without fail is a habit and if you can stick to that simple habit, then you should be able to stick to other habits like eating healthy, going to the gym or drinking enough water.

This may seem like a bit of a stretch, but scientific studies have proven this correlation.

Making your bed gives you a small sense of pride, increases productivity, inspires other good habits and proves that the little things in life matter.

So perhaps you still think that making your bed isn’t worth the time it takes in the morning, but I can assure you that those two minutes can change your life. Not to mention how great it feels to get into a perfectly made bed at the end of a long day.