6 Reasons Why You Should Stop Working From Your Bed And How You Can Improve Your Work-Life Balance
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We all feel tempted to work in a more comfortable work environment. This is especially the case when we’ve been working from home for more than a year now. It can often be quite difficult to resist those soft sheets and fluffy, thick pillows, but they can do you more harm than good. Many others also insist that working from their bed helps them reduce anxiety and increases their creativity, but this is not the case for a majority of people. It’s essential that you set up a positive work environment. Here are six reasons why you should stop working from your bed and seven tips to improve your work-life balance:
1. It Affects Your Sleep Quality
We are naturally wired to connect our beds with relaxation and rest. When you work where you sleep, your mind begins to see that space as one for activities rather than a space for rest. This confusion can seriously affect your regular sleeping patterns and cause issues with your circadian rhythm. When you use technology in your bed, you expose yourself to blue light. This light stops the secretion of melatonin and can cause sleep deprivation, heart problems, and plenty of other diseases (1).
2. Your Work Productivity Decreases
When you use your bed as a workspace, you bring your work into the bedroom with you in both a literal and figurative manner. If you’ve been working all day from the comfort of your bed, you’re probably going to continue thinking about work and thus have a hard time “turning it off” before sliding into bed. You might also find yourself feeling less productive because of this and taking naps whenever you feel like it.
3. It Can Ruin Your Posture
The soft surface and layout of the mattress encourage people to stay in a sprawled or slouched position. As time goes on, this consistently terrible posture will cause you to have body pains, specifically in your back, neck, and hips. Even if you sit in the bed properly, you’ll still be on an uneven surface for a long duration of time. Keeping your monitor at the incorrect height can also curve your back and eventually create pain that causes a decrease in your quality of sleep. This can also lead to musculoskeletal disease (2).
4. It Can Affect Your Relationship
Your cellphone can distract you when you are in the company of your partner, and this may have an indirect impact on your relationship satisfaction. This same logic is also applied to other gadgets that are used for work. The truth is that we also associate beds as a place that’s meant to be shared with our partners. Hence, working from your bed when your significant other is around you can cause your partner to feel detached and ignored.
5. Your Bed Is Covered In Bacteria
When the skin comes in contact with bedsheets, the friction can scrape off the outer layers of your skin cells. These skin cells carry sweat, oil, saliva, and other fluids, hence serving as the perfect breeding ground for dust mites and bacteria. If you have prolonged interaction with these organisms, they may cause allergies, skin diseases, or even asthma flare-ups.
6. It Can Alter Your Body Clock And Mental Health
A bedroom that is dimly lit could keep you tired and cause an alteration in your body clock. Most of the time, bedrooms are darker than rooms as they have fewer windows and the curtains are closed. Sunlight can be a natural mood booster and can even help lift the room’s energy levels. Have you ever felt like you’re constantly bringing work home with you? Well, working from your bed takes that one step further.
Work/life balance is crucial for both your physical and mental health. Here are seven ways that you can fix this:
1. Keep Your Bedroom An Electronics Free Environment
2. Stop Working At Least One Hour Before You Go To Bed
3. Avoid Any Stressful Activities Before Bed
4. Create A Workspace If You Can
5. Stick To A Proper Routine
6. Don’t Start Your Workday In Your Sleep Clothes
7. Make Sure You Get Enough Sleep
In the end, the only way you can get some much-needed rest, as well as work done is to establish a proper environment for you to work in. This pandemic has definitely taken a toll on both our physical and mental health and the only way for us to fix these two things is to maintain boundaries with ourselves. So if you are someone who feels like you need to improve your work-life balance, definitely check out some of these tips and let us know all your thoughts in the comment section below!
