Just as swirling thoughts can make it difficult to fall asleep, a cluttered bedroom can make it difficult to wind down before sleep. Eliminating clutter is part of creating a relaxing environment that will encourage sleep.

How Do Cluttered Surroundings Affect Your Sleep?

Clutter can weigh on us mentally. It’s a problem that only grows larger if not dealt with. “All that stuff can make us feel anxious and overwhelmed. And if it’s in our bedrooms, it can even keep us from sleeping well. Research has shown that those with cluttered bedrooms have more trouble getting enough sleep,” according to an article in Discover Magazine. Eliminating clutter is the first step toward creating a hygienic bedroom, which is recommended for healthy sleep.

1. Visual To-do’s Can Distract You from Falling Asleep

Visible piles of dirty laundry or other half-way done chores are as distracting as the to-do’s running through your head when you lie down to sleep. Just as we’d suggest getting the thoughts out of your head and onto paper as part of your bedtime routine, we suggest some organization to remove the evidence of chores undone from your bedroom. Keeping your belongings organized or, at least, in drawers and closets, can prevent clutter from being the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning.

When preparing a bedroom for great sleep, we follow the five R’s—remove, reorganize, refresh, replace, and relax—as we detail in our article linked below. The goal of these actions is to eliminate clutter, which can create a stress response. In an interview for the American Psychological Association website on why clutter stresses us out, Deacon Joseph Ferrari, PhD, professor of psychology at DePaul University, defined clutter as “an overabundance of possessions that collectively can create chaos and disorderly living spaces.” Ferrari has found “there’s a negative correlation between life satisfaction and clutter.” The greater the clutter, the greater the stress. Additionally, women seemed to be negatively affected to a greater degree by stress from clutter than men, according to Neuroscience News.

2. Piles on the Floor Create a Hazard When You Rise During the Night

As we mention in other articles, you want to limit your exposure to light when you’re trying to fall asleep. That includes limiting the light to that necessary to safely make your way between your bed and the bathroom during the night. You can’t maneuver safely in low light if your path is filled with tripping hazards. A trip and fall can diminish your chances of getting back to bed and sleep.

3. Mess Interferes with the Desired Association Between Your Bed and Sleep

Experts often recommend using the bed only for sleep (and sex) so the brain associates lying down in bed with falling asleep as opposed to watching television, eating, or doing homework. Similarly, you want your brain to associate the bedroom with preparing for sleep as opposed to anything else.

If you’re a follower of Feng Shui, which addresses the flow of energy in the room, you’ll place your bed in the commanding position facing the door with your headboard against a solid wall and space on the other three sides.

Remove from the bedroom anything you don’t need for going to bed and sleeping. That includes work and exercise equipment. Tidy up the nightstand. Limit things on the top to those you’ll need for the night.

4. Clutter Makes It Hard to Create a Hygienic Bedroom

We often refer to sleep hygiene, the actions that promote healthy sleep. Sleep hygiene includes your activities during the day that can affect your sleep at night like going to bed and waking at the same time every day, getting regular exercise, exposing yourself to sunlight in the morning, and avoiding big meals or alcohol too close to bedtime. You’ll want to create a bedroom environment that is dark, quiet, and cool.

Sleep hygiene encompasses bed hygiene, which refers to comfortable and clean bedding. We are proponents of consistent use of waterproof mattress pads and zippered pillow protectors to maintain the cleanliness of your mattress and pillows. We all drool and sweat when we sleep so, even without any obvious soil, we recommend regular laundering of your bedding. This will also remove any dust and dust mites that might be attracted to your bedding by dead skin cells left behind. It’s much easier to create a hygienic bed when the clutter on and around it has been removed.

5. Bedmaking Is Easier with an Organized Linen Closet

If you’ve ever opened a carefully folded fitted sheet to discover it’s the wrong size for the bed you’re making, you’ll understand that an organized linen closet or drawer can make life easier. It can be as simple as getting rid of linens for bed sizes you no longer possess. To save hotel housekeepers the time this would take, we design sheets for our hotel clients with different colored stitching to correspond to different sized mattresses. If possible, consider different colored or styled sheets for different sized beds in your home. If you like all white sheets like we do, give different size sheets their own shelves. You can fold the sheet set (pillowcases, sheets, and duvets) together for an entire sheet change. Having your linen closet organized makes storing and changing sheets much less of a chore.

Experts recommend making your bed every morning so that you have one accomplishment behind you. You’ll also have a made bed to look forward to climbing into at night.

Eliminate bedroom clutter for a great night’s sleep.

-Team at down etc

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About down etc

For over twenty years, down etc has worked with hoteliers and professional housekeepers in hotels around the world to manufacture and provide pillows and bedding that will offer hotel guests memorably great sleep. Through our retail website, we seek to provide products that will result in the same quality sleep for our customers at home. We believe in the restorative power of a great night’s sleep, whether at home or away. That’s the reason down etc wrote the book on it, Roll Into a Perfectly Made Bed: All You Need to Know About the Art of Bedmaking.

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