You’ve had an exhausting day: two midterms back to back, a work shift squeezed in between, and a grueling two-hour call with your mom that somehow turned into a debate about your future. By the time you make it back to your dorm, you’re running on fumes. All you want to do is kick off your shoes, drop your bag, and collapse into the one place that still feels safe— your bed.
You open the door already imagining a few hours of mindless doomscrolling and quiet bliss, but when you look down, the sheets are twisted, the blanket is somehow across the room, and your pillows are annoyingly unformed. You pause. Suddenly, the comfort you spent all day waiting for feels like another responsibility. Instead of rest, you’re greeted with one more thing to add to a laundry list of unfinished tasks, and somehow the day doesn’t feel over anymore.
You know it’s stupid that an unmade bed affects your mood, and you kick yourself a little for it. It is just pieces of fabric that take two minutes to fix, yet you still avoid the task every morning. Maybe you snooze your alarm and rush out the door. You look at the mess you slept in and tell yourself you’ll do it later, but you never really do.
In the morning, you find yourself at a small crossroads: stand up and make your bed, or pretend it doesn’t really matter. You put it off, deciding that scrolling Instagram and commenting on your friend’s post takes priority. You rationalize it with a simple, “I’ll be back tonight anyway,” convincing yourself you’re saving time. Really, you’re choosing to step around a small task instead of finishing it.
And suddenly, “I’ll make it tonight” becomes “I’ll start the assignment later,” “I can probably respond to this email tonight,” or “I still have time, I can probably delay figuring out my major.” You defer the responsibility to a future version of yourself, even though you know you’ll still be the one dealing with it. You don’t make your bed, and night-you quietly resent morning-you.
So one morning, you test it. After washing your face, you return to your room and actually make the bed. You pull the sheets tight, straighten the pillows, and realize—wow—that took almost no time at all. It feels painfully anticlimactic. Making your bed didn’t transform you into a productive, organized person. But you leave for class feeling slightly calmer than usual, and you’re not really sure why.
You’ve just had another exhausting day: a shift where a customer escalated a situation that didn’t need escalating. Your midterm grade comes back lower than you hoped. You kick off your shoes, drop your bag, and look anxiously towards your bed. This time, it’s already waiting for you. You collapse into it, and for the first time all day, nothing is asking anything from you. Your problems aren’t solved, sure, but a small weight lifts anyway. You realize the morning version of you actually did something kind for the night version of you.
This was never about your bed. It was about a promise you kept to yourself—a small, finished task that stood as proof you can influence your own day. As college students, life often feels like nothing but pressure and uncertainty about the future, like you need to have all these answers you don’t actually know yet. Maybe you can’t control all of that. But you can still control how you begin. If something as small as making your bed can bring an immense sense of relief, it really isn’t about the sheets at all. You don’t need to fix your whole life—you just need to stop adding unnecessary weight to it.