The importance of your sleeping environment for your sleep quality has long been understood. The lights should be off, the temperature cooler, and outside noises blocked as much as possible. However, the cleanliness of your bedroom can also influence your sleep quality.
There’s a reason why a clean room is encouraged, and not just for appearance’s sake—a clean room can reduce your stress levels and improve the quality of your air, protecting your sleep.
How a Tidy Environment Promotes Sleep
The next time you’re struggling to fall asleep, take stock of your environment—if your room is cluttered and dirty, it may be indirectly affecting your sleep.
Reduces Stress
Even if you’re unaware of it, a cluttered and messy environment can significantly weigh on your mental and emotional well-being; there’s a reason why a cluttered room is often attributed to a cluttered mind.
Research shows that cluttered spaces can negatively affect your overall well-being and cause an increase in cortisol levels, a sign of greater stress. Stress can then make falling asleep difficult due to faster heart and breathing rates and a release of adrenaline.
In addition to raising your stress levels and making sleep hard to come by, you may also find yourself tossing and turning at night if your thoughts are overwhelmed by the mess and how impossible it seems to tackle.
When you clean up your room, you get the satisfaction of a job well done and the contentment of knowing that your space is clean, keeping your stress levels down. A clean space also makes it easier to relax and unwind while increasing serenity, a potent feeling when you’re looking to fall asleep.
If your room is cluttered and you have a hard time falling asleep, decluttering may help.
Improves Air Quality
The air inside our homes can contain pet dander, dust, pollen, and other allergens, and the quality of this air can then affect our sleep. For instance, if you have allergies or asthma, inhaling these particles can cause sneezing, coughing, or other respiratory issues, which can make it hard to fall asleep and may even cause you to wake up during the night due to discomfort. This can lead to a decline in sleep quality and greater tiredness the next day.
One study found that poor sleep has a strong association with house dust mite allergic rhinitis in both adults and children, and keeping a dirty environment allows dust mites to run unchecked. Yet another study found that allergies, in general, come with a higher risk of nocturnal dysfunctions, including insomnia, sleep-disordered breathing, restless sleep, snoring, and obstructive sleep apnea. If you’re allergic to dust or pet dander, having a dirty environment can increase your risk of allergic symptoms.
There are other ways in which a dirty environment can affect your health, as well. If you have any damp areas in your bedroom, mold and mildew can develop, which can trigger respiratory problems if left alone. If the clutter is high, they may block these damp areas, allowing mold to grow unnoticed. Mold has been associated with an increase in insomnia and snoring, while mildew has been shown to be associated with allergy symptoms, asthma, and chronic bronchitis alongside a greater number of sleep complaints.
When it comes to improving your indoor air quality, keeping a clean environment is your greatest weapon. Regular dusting and vacuuming can help remove the allergens that accumulate on surfaces. By removing these allergens, you may notice your allergy symptoms dissipate, allowing you to breathe easier during the night. Keeping your room clutter-free also ensures that, should any damp spots appear, you can quickly recognize and manage them.
Reduces Nighttime Injuries
If you find yourself getting out of bed during the night to visit the bathroom, having a cluttered room can increase your risk of injury due to tripping over objects that are in the way. Even if you can easily weave around the clutter during the day, traveling during the night when your brain is still fuddled by sleep can make the task more difficult and may lead to your tripping over something that is in the walkway.
By keeping a tidy bedroom, it becomes easier and safer to make these nighttime bathroom trips, lessening your risk of injury, which would otherwise keep you from sleep for longer than you’d like. In the case of a severe injury, you may even find that your sleep is interrupted for nights to come, leading to many subsequent nights of sleep deprivation.
Conversely, when your environment is clean, you’re able to go to the bathroom and return to bed without incident, allowing you to quickly get back to sleep.
Tips for Keeping a Tidy Bedroom
Knowing how important your bedroom environment and its cleanliness are for sleep, don’t hesitate to start working on tidying it up and keeping it clean to ensure you sleep better.
The following are some tips to keep your bedroom clean so that you can improve your sleep quality:
- Regularly clean and declutter your space, specifically focusing on dusting and vacuuming.
- Wash your bedding frequently to remove allergens.
- Keep your room well-ventilated and prevent too-high humidity levels.
- Consider using an air purifier in your bedroom to further clean the air of allergens.
- Keep walkways clear of clutter or other objects that pose a tripping hazard at night.
As a bonus, when cleaning your bedroom, consider using sleep-promoting scents such as lavender to further increase the coziness of your room.
Tidy Up to Sleep Better
While there are many nighttime habits that we can introduce to our nighttime routine in order to sleep better, one task to add to your daytime agenda is to clean your bedroom if the clutter has become too much. Not only can reducing clutter lower your stress, but it also helps to remove dust and allergens from the air, improving your sleep quality.
The next time you have a hard time falling asleep, the key for the next night may be to clean during the day so that, when bedtime rolls around, you have a clean and relaxing room to fall asleep in.
