How do you leave your room in the morning? Is your bed neatly made, or is it lying just as you rolled out of it, unmade and waiting for your return? 

If you’re a bed-maker, then you’ll love that National Make Your Bed Day on September 11th celebrates your good habits. If you’re not a bed-maker, this might give you a reason to become one. Or to at least give it a try on this day.

The Benefits of Making Your Bed

When you were a child, the main benefit of making your bed was to get your parents to stop nagging you to do it. Now that you’re an adult, that negative consequence has been removed, but there are still a lot of good reasons to make your bed. The following five reasons might make you a convert.

1. Start With a Feeling of Accomplishment

Making your bed is really no big task. It takes a couple of minutes, it’s easy to do, and it instantly instills you with a sense of accomplishment. 

Your bed takes up a large percentage of your room, and when you look into your space, if the bed isn’t made, the whole thing looks messy. On the opposite side, if you make your bed and then take a look back at your room before you head out to tackle the world, you see order, and you know that you made it happen.

2. End With a Feeling of Comfort

You’ve had a really stressful day, and now that it’s time to go to bed, you’re delighted to see an inviting and organized bed just waiting for you. Believe it or not, this can determine how restful your sleep is.

The National Sleep Foundation conducted a poll on messy and clean bedrooms and discovered that people sleep better and longer when their bedrooms are clean. They stressed that turning your bedroom into a place that makes you happy, and that gives you comfort, is a key ingredient in turning good night’s sleep into a great one.

3. Removes Stress

Simply looking at clutter causes many people to feel stress or, at the very least, a sense of discomfort. A tidy space, on the other hand, has a calming effect. By making your bed, you’ve given your room a big step in the direction of cleanliness, and that can make you feel calmer and able to deal with stress.

| Related: Feng Shui for Less Stress and Improved Wellbeing |

4. You’ll Be Happier

An article in Psychology Today looked into a survey of 68,000 people and found that out of the people who reported being bed-makers, a majority of them consider themselves happy, while a majority of non-bed-makers said they were unhappy.

Going even deeper into the results, the bed-makers were more likely to own their own homes, exercise regularly, like their jobs, and feel well-rested on a regular basis. The non-bed-makers experienced the opposite feelings.

5. Bed-Making Is a Gateway Habit

Developing a few good habits that center around your daily activities gives you a sense of accomplishment and instills good feelings about yourself. On a daily basis, you feel great about having made your bed, working out, getting to work on time, and making healthy meal choices. 

These are small things in the grand scheme of life, but doing them daily can make a big difference. Research has shown a contagious quality to good habits. This means that small good habits can lead to other good habits. It’s the feeling of accomplishment, doing something good for yourself, and the enjoyment of order that turns a simple chore into an addictive and rewarding habit. 

Tips for Making Your Bed

Of course, you know how to make your bed, right? But can you make a bed as the professionals do in a hotel? A bed that looks so inviting, you can’t help but plop down on it the minute you enter the room? That takes effort, skill, and the following tips to master it correctly.

Hospital Corners

The preciseness of your corners is crucial to making a bed that looks crisp and clean. It’s a little tricky when you try it the first time, but it gets much easier the more you do it. 

♦ Put the fitted sheet on the mattress

♦ Lay the flat sheet on top

♦ Move to a corner at the foot of the bed

♦ Lift the mattress and tuck the foot end of the sheet under the mattress

♦ Grab the excess sheet on the side of the bed and lift it up. It will form a 45° angle with the corner of the mattress

♦ Tuck the triangle portion that is hanging down below the mattress under it on the side

♦ Now bring the part you’re still holding up down over the side of the mattress and tuck that in

Duvet or Top Blanket Placement

Placing your duvet or top blanket on the bed is fairly easy. Most people know that you want to have it hang equally on three sides, excluding the top only. What many people don’t realize is that you want to have the top edge of it land about six inches short of the top of the mattress.

Pillow Placement

In the past, folding the comforter up over the pillow was considered the standard. Today the pillows take centerstage. 

There are a number of ways to arrange your pillows on your bed, but all of the current trends put the focus on the pillows. Try for an overstuffed and luxurious piling of pillows.

The Bottom Line

Making your bed sets the stage for a day full of accomplishments by giving you one small task that anybody can do. Not only that but having a made-bed to come home to gives you a sense of peacefulness and calm that can help soothe stress and can lead to a more restful sleep. 

With the beginning of your day and the end of the day so heavily impacted by one good habit, it’s easy to see how the middle can just fall into place. 

Of course, making your bed isn’t the key to happiness, and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t do it, but why not give it a try on World Make Your Bed Day and see if has an effect on your life.

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