I was never the type of person that’d make my bed.
Despite realizing, even at that time, that it felt nicer pulling the covers off a made bed, it didn’t matter all that much to me because I figured the bed would get messed up anyways – why bother making it each morning?
Lately, I’ve been making my bed as part of my morning routine. Due to the current circumstances – isolating due to COVID-19 – my bedroom has also become my work office, and school library.
I had developed a tendency to take frequent breaks where’d I jump in my unmade bed, and start watching videos, or scrolling through Twitter, intermittently throughout the day.
I realized this was a pain point in my productivity and an overall appeal to escapism, so I wanted to remove this point of friction.
The first way was to make the bed less accessible.
While I can’t move my bed out of my bedroom, I can make it harder to jump in – by making it.
By neatly tucking in my sheets, and laying my blanket over my bed, I’m effectively preventing myself from hopping onto my bed, until my intention is to actually sleep.
It’s been working so far.
I also enjoyed finding a cycle in my personal habits, trying to isolate the root cause, and finding a solution for the problem.
Another situation that’s similar to this is my morning stretching routine.
I forgot to mention that my bedroom is also my yoga studio, so in the morning I like to perform a set of stretches and exercises on my floor.
If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m also the kinda person to leave dirty clothes on the ground.
Following a similar pattern, this was a point of friction, as if my floor was filled with clothes, I was far less likely to engage in my stretching routine. I’m also aware that placing my dirty clothes on the floor is a habit that isn’t good, so I’m playing myself against myself, to create new habits by replacing old ones.
It’s far harder to create a new habit.
Instead, mend one that already exists.
You’re already used to performing that bad one everyday, now it’s just a matter of using it as a cue towards the positive one.
I’ve digressed substantially, but the point is, I enjoy having my bed made, as I do my floor clean.
I’m going to continue to find bad habits, look for good habits I want to adopt, and somehow cross them against each other so they both happen.
Tangentially, I’m grateful for my made bed.
The feeling of getting into nicely tucked sheets is one that allows me to sleep feeling grateful every night.
Grateful for my made bed, but further that I have a bed to sleep on, as well. That I’m able to enter the night without any worries, and those worries that I may have, are far more trivial than others. Grateful for the health I possess and the ability to sleep knowing I have food for tomorrow, and a shelter for the night.