Do You Make Your Bed?

What is it about making your bed?

Do you resist? Does it seem silly? “I’ll just mess it up again tonight!”

Recently Seth Perler, an Executive Function and ADHD coach and educator who has his own YouTube channel, spoke openly about his personal journey with ADHD on the Tales From the Journey podcast episode “Overcoming Executive Functioning Challenges With Seth Perler.”

As Seth spoke about the mentors and people who had helped him along the way, he told the story of Andy, who asked, “Seth, do you make your bed? Why don’t you start making your bed?'“ As Seth says, “it had nothing to do with the issue, but it had everything to do with the issue.”

Making the bed fits into an important message for self-regulation, of “just doing” the things in daily life that create order and calm the mind.

I do make my bed; I do it as gift to myself, for the next time I walk back in the room. Because I appreciate how nice the room looks when the bed is made, I think of that future feeling when I am straightening everything up. Making my bed has become part of my routine for creating beauty, order, and calm focus for myself.

A coaching client told me how she had reinforced the habit for herself: she thought of making the bed as completing the sleep cycle. For her, it was a daily ritual that signaled the transition from sleeping to waking, to begin a new day.

Notice how the words we use to think of our actions - in this case, of making the bed - support the actions to become habits, to be remembered and practiced. Words are an important way we can characterize and amplify the meaning of simple acts, and give ourselves the daily routines that ground us.