The way we see it, the world is divided into two types of people: those who can't leave the house each morning without a freshly made bed, and those who can't be bothered, opting to leave the sheets a rumpled mess until they return to sleep.
For the majority of people, making their bed each morning is an essential step towards a productive and fulfilling day. In fact, the National Sleep Foundation found that 7 out of 10 people they studied made their bed every single day. Consider the virality of Naval Admiral William McCraven's 2014 commencement speech at the University of Texas, where he compared making your bed to changing your life. "If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day," he imparted. "It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another."
Despite the feel-good aspect that a tidily made bed gives us, a scientific research team from King University in England is now encouraging us to follow the wisdom of our teenaged selves, urging us NOT to make our beds every day. Their reasoning? The warm and humid layers of a made bed provides the ideal condition for dust mites to thrive and breed, actively multiplying throughout the day. Dust mites - which feed off the natural sloughing of the skin - are known to contribute to allergies and asthma.
"We know that mites can only survive by taking in water from the atmosphere using small glands on the outside of their body," says the study's lead researcher Stephen Pretlove. "Something as simple as leaving a bed unmade during the day can remove moisture from the sheets and mattress so the mites will dehydrate and eventually die."
Sounds scary? Before you abandon your daily bed-making habit, consider this: dust mites don't take too kindly to extremely hot temperatures. Washing your sheets in the hot water cycle will kill them, and changing your sheets once per week will keep the dust mite population to a minimum.
So there you have it... Despite what your parents told you, making your bed is not always the right thing to do. What do you think about this study? Will you keep making your bed each day, or will this prompt you to leave the sheets rumpled? Share your opinion below with our poll.
