The Scientific Reason Why Making Your Bed Is A Terrible Idea

Fellow lazy friends, rejoice: It turns out, making your bed may be doing more harm than good. (Take that, mom!)

Here's the deal: At any given time, there are an average of 1.5 million microscopic insects called dust mites living between your sheets. These tiny, beetle-like creatures feed off human skin cells and require a warm, damp atmosphere to survive and thrive.

When we sleep, we sweat. A lot. Rumor has it, the average person may sweat up to a liter of fluid per night. This creates an ideal breeding ground for the mites, who will begin to hump like bunnies and deliver their creepy, eight-legged spawn.

That is, unless you leave your bed unmade.

One researcher, Dr. Stephen Pretlove from Kingston University School of Architecture, offers a simple explanation. When you make your bed, especially immediately after waking, you're trapping your body heat, your skin cells, and most importantly, your sweat, all over the bed. But leaving the bed unmade exposes the sheets to air and light, drying them out and thus, depleting the mites' lifelines.

Dr. Pretlove explains,

“We know that mites can only survive by taking in water from the atmosphere ing small glands on the outside of their body…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.”

Unfortunately, never making your bed won't put you in the clear; you'll still have mites. But if you have allergies — mite poop (yes, seriously) being a common allergen — it's worth testing out to see if it makes a difference.

If all else fails, well, at least you won't have to defend your laziness anymore.

Citations: Why You Should Never Make Your Bed (The Loop)