You Made Your Bed...

...now lie in it. Taken a little less metaphorically and a little more literally, this phrase is the main topic of a Real Simple article I want to share with you about how to make a perfect bed. This might seem a little off topic, but I assure you, after reading this you will see its importance.

I love making the bed. That is not a joke, it is serious. So serious in fact that it is a joke amongst my family members. They love to tease me about how I like to do chores. But to me, it is one of the best parts of my day. I like to get into a freshly made bed every night. I don't like when the covers aren't tight on the mattress and I don't like when the edges of the sheets don't match up to the headboard. I love pulling the sheets nice and crisp over the bed and I love to fluff the duvet so all the feathers are perfectly distributed. I love making the bed.

So when I started feeling really tired in the mornings, like I hadn't had a good night's sleep I was a little concerned. I have 400 thread count sheets and a real down comforter. I have a pillow top mattress and a fan that blows perfectly on me. Why, oh why was I not sleeping well?

Then I read this article on realsimple.com that basically says, your bed itself is what causes you to sleep well or not sleep well, and that there are three keys to crafting the perfect bed. I found it pretty interesting, and since we all sleep, hopefully on a bed, I thought you might find it interesting too.

1. The Mattress - I will be perfectly honest with you, when I first saw that commercial about how skin cells and bugs get in your mattress so that is doubles in weight over eight years, I freaked out. That sounds disgusting. But apparently, even more than buying the right mattress, caring for it is important. You need to flip and rotate your mattress every few months and vacuum out those nasty skin cells.

2. Bedcovers - Apparently, my expensive and fabulous down comforter is the source of my insomnia. Covers come in all sorts of fabric (I thought they just came in cotton and feather) and apparently down is hot. And when I looked back on it, I realized that I kept waking up in the night to kick all my covers off because I was too hot to sleep. So apparently it is important to take careful consideration, especially of the fabric, when selecting a blanket for your bed.

3. Pillows - I saw this commercial the other day explaining that your head weighs about as much as a bowling ball. Then the demonstrator dropped a bowling ball on a bunch of different types of pillows to show how unsupportive they were. First of all, how is my neck still working if it has to hold a bowling ball on top of it all day? And second, my essentially flat pillows were obviously not cutting it. So I got some bigger, fluffier ones. Real Simple gives a break down of the type of pillow you should choose based on how you sleep.

I have been sleeping better recently, so I guess all of this helped. You may have already known everything that article pointed out that I so obviously didn't, but if not and you have been feeling a little sleepy these days, it is an interesting read for sure. Then you will have tons more energy for hanging out around Greensboro, hopefully at our upcoming Festival of Lights!