Why You Shouldn’t Keep Stuff Under Your Bed
Improve your sleep by decluttering your mind.
I want to tell you a surprising thing I’ve learned about sleep. But first, I need to share a story from my recent trip to Brooklyn.
I was housesitting for friends traveling in Europe. They’d asked me to look after their cats. It seemed like a great deal – all I had to do was feed the cats, and I’d get to stay in their beautiful penthouse in Williamsburg.
But I was having trouble sleeping. Every morning, at the crack of dawn, the cats would jump on the bed, demanding to be fed. The master bedroom was in an open-air loft, so I couldn’t shut the door.
I texted the owners: What should I do? They suggested I try feeding the cats at night, so they wouldn’t be hungry in the morning. I tried that. It didn’t work. Once again, at 6:30 AM, I was awoken by the cats leaping onto the bed.
I couldn’t be mad at them. I get irritable when I’m hungry, too. But I didn’t like having my sleep interrupted by a feline aerial assault.
The cats were sweet and adorable, but they were ruining my sleep.
I moved downstairs to the kids’ room. This meant trading a king-size bed for a twin mattress. But the kids’ room had an actual door I could close, to keep out the cats. It worked like a charm. For the remainder of my stay, my sleep was blissfully uninterrupted. I had lucid dreams. I woke each morning feeling fully refreshed.
The experience made me reflect on sleep and the mysteries of nocturnal life.
How does our bedroom environment affect how we sleep?
Two Kinds of Sleep Tips
Sleep tips fall into two categories. The first is basic sleep hygiene. Get away from screens, keep your room at a cool temperature, sleep in complete darkness, stick to a regular sleep schedule. I recently shared a list of my top 10 sleep tips.
The second category is deeper, almost mystical: Don’t bring work to bed. Read fiction before bed. Don’t keep anything under your bed.
That last one was always a head-scratcher for me. Who cares what’s under my bed? Out of sight, out of mind, right? Anyone who’s lived in New York City knows space is at a premium. The area under your bed is valuable real estate. Where else are you going to put those bulky winter clothes?
I was wrong. Feng Shui experts say keeping clutter under the bed can create agitation or restlessness. Studies have shown that people with cluttered bedrooms are more likely to have a sleep disorder.
How could a shoebox under the bed affect your sleep?
It’s all about your unconscious mind.
A good deal of mental life happens without our knowing much about it. While your conscious mind shuts down during sleep, your unconscious mind remains active, controlling functions like breathing and heartbeat. Your unconscious mind also replays and consolidates memories while you sleep. (Note: Mental health professionals tend to use the word “unconscious” rather than “subconscious.”)
Thomas Edison said:
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
For most of us, our unconscious mind is haunted by dormant (or repressed) memories. They may be thoughts of past relationships, anxiety about our family, fears of being inadequate. Like ghosts in the attic, they occasionally wander downstairs to our conscious mind, causing fear and anxiety.
We do our best to push these dormant memories away. We sweep them under the rug, hide them deep in the recesses of our mind. It’s easy to understand why. We don’t want to be paralyzed by our darkest thoughts. Yet try as we might, we can’t erase them from our brain. And these dormant thoughts have a way of bubbling up to the surface in our dreams.
The things we keep under our bed—suitcases, shoeboxes—are like dormant memories.
They’re out of sight, but not out of mind. We know they exist. They live rent-free in our unconscious mind. They interfere with the important work our unconscious mind does when we’re asleep. Like the gunk that accumulates in a car engine before an oil change.
Holding onto cluttered thoughts can be a drain on cognitive function. Just as we need to clear out a computer’s hard drive for optimal performance, improving memory requires your brain to do a little strategic forgetting.
Studies have shown that forgetting things is an active part of learning and memory maintenance:
“While forgetting is commonly considered a deficit of memory function due to its association with pathological states, an alternative emerging perspective considers forgetting as an adaptive function of the brain that may contribute to learning and memory updating.
Recent findings suggest that forgetting is an active process that involves new plasticity that modulates the functionality of specific memory traces in order to promote adaptive behavior.”
When it comes to our memories, we need to periodically clean house. Do a little Marie Kondo tidying up. Take inventory of the old thoughts and memories gathering dust in the basement of our mind.
Cleaning out the space under your bed can be seen as akin to tidying up the cluttered thoughts lurking in your unconscious mind. It’s a way to unload the baggage that weighs you down mentally without even realizing it. It frees up space in your mind to form new memories and make new connections.
My Journey into the Unconscious
I recently did a medically-supervised ketamine journey (see my blog post about the experience). Psychedelic therapy has been shown to be effective in treating depression and anxiety. One theory for why ketamine therapy works is that it helps you transcend your conscious mind and explore your unconscious.
Before the treatment began, I met with an integration specialist. His job was to make sure I got the most therapeutic value out of the psychedelic journey. He had me do a series of breathwork exercises. He walked me through an inner child exercise: Picture yourself as an 8-year old boy. What would you say to that little boy?
As I later realized, these exercises were an important part of my ketamine therapy. They were priming my brain to get in touch with my unconscious mind. To open the doors to deeper perception.
Over the course of my ketamine journey, I had visions of my late father, a past relationship, and my nephews. I felt like I was in a dialogue across time. When the journey was over, I wrote down my thoughts in a journal. I felt like I’d confronted some of my fears and insecurities around family, relationships, time, and getting older.
This is what therapy can help us achieve: Becoming aware of the self-destructive thought patterns that hold us back. Whether it’s memories of a lost parent, or a troubled romantic relationship.
Therapy can help us come to grips with how our past is affecting our present state of mind. It teaches us that we are not our thoughts, but rather, we have power over our thoughts. Gaining a deeper understanding of our mind can help us move forward in life.
Carl Jung said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Prime Your Mind for Restful Sleep
While we’re asleep, our conscious mind is switched off, but our unconscious mind keeps working. According to neuroscientists, what we think about and feel right before we go to sleep affects what our brain processes while we’re asleep. A good night’s sleep is a golden opportunity for us to change limiting beliefs and find solutions to problems.
My mother recently told me:
“I often awake with good ideas about how to solve issues that had been difficult the day before.”
How do we create the conditions for deep sleep—to let our mind take a restorative journey into our unconscious?
One of my favorite things to do before bed is read fiction. I curl up with a good novel and read 30 or 40 pages before I turn out the light. It could be a work of literature or a beach read. No thrillers, nothing that stimulates fear or anxiety. By immersing myself in another world, I’m able to escape the troubles of my daily life and slip into a blissful dreamscape.
Other tips that may help you sleep better by priming your unconscious mind: Deep breathing. Visualizing a peaceful scene. Creative writing. Listening to guided hypnosis and guided meditation.
One last tip. Don’t bring your laptop to bed. This makes you associate your bed with work. Being in bed should be an escape from the workday—a refuge, a sanctuary. And please, please, keep your phone on airplane mode, preferably in another room.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are there any unconventional sleep hacks that have worked for you?
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of Vitamin Z.
Until next time,
By Daniel Zahler
Hi there and thanks for reading. I created Vitamin Z to share my research on health and wellness, longevity and healthy aging, and ways to optimize cognitive, physical and emotional health. I serve as an advisor to Noom, a leading digital health company, and have worked with the world’s top healthcare and life sciences companies to develop innovative new solutions to improve health globally. I was trained as a research scientist at Harvard, and I serve as a GLG council member, where I advise global business leaders on healthcare and technology innovation.
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