Random musings: How to Clean Your Bedroom for Better Sleep

Today's blog post is based on a blog post by Dr. Michael Breus:

Have our homes ever been more lived in than in this past year? Most of us have been home, well, pretty much all the time for a long while. Even if you’ve been doing plenty of regular cleaning, you might be feeling extra in need of a good, deep, spring clean in your heavily trafficked home.

Bedrooms get overlooked sometimes, when it comes to both daily cleaning and periodic deep clean throughs. You wash your sheets…but when was the last time you cleaned the blinds in your bedroom, or washed your pillows?

This isn’t about having an Instagram-perfect bedroom. A combination of light, daily freshening up and periodic deep cleaning will have a big impact on how easily you fall asleep and your sleep quality throughout the night.

How?

Getting rid of accumulations of dirt, dust, germs, and debris helps avoid irritating allergies, which are highly disruptive to nightly sleep. Even for people without allergies, a clean bedroom protects against sleep-disrupting irritations to skin and to breathing during sleep.

A bedroom that accumulates dirt, germs, and odor—not only from environmental dust and debris but also from our own sweat and the skin cells we shed at night—will attract insects, including the dreaded bed bugs, which I wrote about recently.

A clean bedroom is radically more inviting, a place you’ll look forward to retreating at the end of a long day. A messy, cluttered bedroom, on the other hand, can be a real source of stress. Remember, stress—of any kind—elevates cortisol. To fall asleep with ease and to sleep soundly throughout the night, we need cortisol levels to follow their natural nightly rhythm and remain low at bedtime.

Taking care of your bedroom environment doesn’t have to be a huge production every day. Tackle some of the more labor-intensive tasks periodically (including washing your mattress, which I’ll talk about in a minute) and do other, lighter cleaning routinely, and you’ll have a bedroom that is consistently welcoming and relaxing, and promotes deeper, more restful and healthful sleep.

Here are 10 tips for getting your bedroom really clean for sleep—and keeping it that way:

Take out what you don’t need
Open your windows and door
Start high and clean top to bottom
Don’t forget the windows.
Remember the forgotten spots!
Clean your mattress
Wash your pillows
Swap out your sheets weekly
Clean comforters, quilts and other bedding every month
Start a daily cleaning practice for your bedroom

Be sure to read his blog post for more details on the 10 steps, including how-to tutorials!

Take 10 minutes to do the daily spot cleaning (4 hours before bed) that has the highest impact on your sleep space, and your bedroom will feel like the soothing, welcoming haven you can’t wait to retreat to. You’ll start your transition to sleep feeling more deeply relaxed and free to transition peacefully into sleep. And you’ll sleep better all night long.

I'm going to start doing these thinks, but I really need to do number 1. I cleaned out my second bedroom to use as an office and most the stuff that was in there found its way into my bedroom!