“Make your bed!” – said every Mom on this planet.
Remember the times you had guests staying over and your room was always the first one up for auction? Which meant you had to make sure your room was impeccable, and your bed had to be spot-on, with all ends tucked neatly into the bed-frame. All this only to come back to a room that looks nothing like what it was. #Hardworkdownthedrain
It seems like all those years of asking us to make our bed had a reason after all. Making your bed, according to a study, gives an appearance of “put-togetherness”. It’s a visual representation of your life and how much control you have over it. Based on the results, I evaluated myself and I have to say, I am quite happy.
A survey, conducted by OnePoll and contracted by Sleepopolis, had 2000 Americans reveal their lifestyle, professing whether they make their bed on a regular basis (or not). The results portrayed bed-makers as “confident, adventurous, sociable, and high-maintenance” (umm…high maintenance? excuse me?), while non-bed-makers as “curious, moody, sarcastic, and shy”. Bed-makers are, also, bright-eyed morning people, getting better quality of sleep and more time on them to get work done during the day. You know why? Because they don’t hit that snooze button a thousand times, making them wake up earlier than non-bed-makers.
US Navy SEAL William H. McCraven’s speech in 2014 explains this is a simple way. Making your bed every morning, unconsciously tells our mind that we’ve achieved one task for the day. That sense of pride and responsibility will take over, encouraging us to do another task, and one after that, and that goes on throughout the day. And by the end of the day, voila! Your focus on getting one task completed has, subsequently, led to completion of all tasks for the day.
Hence, becoming a bed-makers kicks off a sense of productivity, creating a chain, and feeling of pride and satisfaction upon completing a task. It’s a habit, that if you think about, doesn’t really do any harm but instead puts us in a position of control.
I am, however, not entirely convinced, but all the more confused, that you can know a person solely by their bed-making habits. I mean, I am confident and sociable, but also extremely sarcastic with hints of moody and shyness. But, I make my bed. So, where do I stand in the results?
A question – Do we make the bed or does the bed make us?
By Namita Anish
