The grueling stretch between New Year’s Day and springtime can seem interminable. It’s tempting to spend the long, gray months in hibernation mode with a book or your phone while you await brighter days.
Enter “bed rotting,” the Internet’s new favorite inactive activity. More entertaining than just sleeping in and somehow even less productive than being a couch potato, choosing to bed rot is a popular TikTok mental health trend associated with “reclaiming” time that might otherwise be spent on working, exercising, studying or other “productive” activities. It may mean you opt to stay in bed from sunrise to sunset for perhaps even a whole weekend or more, only leaving it to use the bathroom, get food or retrieve other essentials. Some “rotters” report feeling rejuvenated afterward. One Reddit user claimed three days of staying in bed had given them “the best mental focus ... in about 2 months.” The post continues: “I felt as if my body was due for a massive upgrade I had been putting off.”
Some who choose to start bed rotting might find this practice restorative. But its ostensible benefits can backfire, mucking up the mind and body’s most reliable, natural method of resetting.
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Elective bed rotting is yet another purportedly wellness-supporting state of rest and relaxation that was spawned by popular online culture, like its social media sibling “goblin mode,” which promotes a similar focus on voluntary inactivity. The overall concept even harks back to the trope of the fashionably sickly Victorian woman laid up in bed with a vague malaise—depictions that also reinforced sexism and marginalized those with disability or chronic illness in the 1800s. Indeed, while this restoration method is a catchy trend with healthy, nondisabled people, those with health conditions or disabilities may need to remain in bed for extended periods of time.
Part of the enduring appeal of lying in bed for people who are otherwise able to be mobile may be that it flouts the pervasive norm that exercise and activity are good for our body and mind, even when they feel like the opposite. Heeding our desire to vegetate may simply feel far easier than working out for a few hours a week, as the World Health Organization recommends. Such a practice is almost always done in the one place we most strongly associate with regular shut-eye, which may interfere the recommended seven to nine hours of nightly sleep for the average adult.
“There’s so many problems, when it comes to bed rotting, for sleep,” says Fiona Barwick, a clinical associate professor and associate division chief of behavioral sleep medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Bed rotting appears to affect three important elements of sleep health, Barwick says. First, she points to the circadian rhythm, our internal clock that’s tuned to light and dark and regulates the sleep-wake cycle. Some people participating in the trend may stay in bed all day, perhaps without catching a glimpse of light except the glow of a screen. Receiving no light early in the day followed by getting copious light toward the evening (by switching on all the lights, for example) can scramble this internal clock, which runs close to a 24-hour cycle in most people.
“Light tends to suppress and delay melatonin,” the sleep-inducing hormone released by the pineal gland in our brain, Barwick says. “If you’re rotting in bed, and you don’t get light until the afternoon, you haven’t gotten that circadian morning light signal that sets the timing for your sleep the next night.”
Circadian rhythm also helps regulate our sleep drive, the biologically innate need to slumber. Sleep drive builds throughout the day, compounded by activity and exercise. Come nighttime, you should feel ready to snooze. But staying in bed for too long can throw your sleep drive out of whack, pushing back your sleepiness window. And a day of lying around probably means there’s no physical activity to help build sleep drive.
Using your bed as a place to spend time awake also influences the third aspect: sleep cues, a major part of sleep hygiene. These cues are the mental associations you form between sleep and certain times, places (such as your bed) and even sensory inputs such as scents. “Making sure your bed is strongly, clearly associated with sleep and not wakeful activities is one of the evidence-based techniques for better sleep,” Barwick says. If you spend a day in bed on TikTok, then “the bed-and-sleep cue will be weak, which will not help sleep.”
There is such a thing as spending too much time in bed—and that point arrives relatively quickly. “If you’re bed rotting for a day, it’s not going to be a big deal,” Barwick says. Although most sleep experts don’t consider the new trend healthy, Barwick says that she’s not too worried about people lying around for one afternoon or day, say, once a month. Periods longer or more frequent, however, may cause some backlash in the form of fatigue, a dysregulated internal clock and higher levels of stress from facing duties we have only temporarily escaped.
Excess time in bed can also weigh on mental health and affect sleep that way, according to Alon Avidan, a professor of clinical neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sleep and psychiatric symptoms have a “bidirectional” relationship, he explains. For example, depression might increase fatigue, but sleeping more to relieve that fatigue may also exacerbate depression symptoms. “We demonstrate that poor sleep can actually worsen depression if you don’t get sufficient sleep,” he says.
If you’re staying in bed just a little too much, Avidan emphasizes the importance of understanding why you feel the need to do so in the first place. For example, staying in bed may not only be helpful but essential to those with a disabling chronic illness like long COVID. The issue may also stem from burnout, a physiological problem that can hamper good sleep and all its benefits, or a nagging issue in your waking life. To snap out of a rut, Avidan advises waking up early in your sleep-wake cycle, no matter when you went to sleep, and basking in some natural light, if possible, for about an hour. If you routinely consume caffeine, make sure you get it in within a few hours of waking so it won’t impinge on your sleep drive later. And if you feel sleepy, take a 20-minute power nap in the middle of your day. Barwick adds that spending some aimless time wandering outside could help fulfill the urge to take a break—without putting sleep at risk.
Whether any amount of time spent inactive in bed truly helps you sleep and live better is for you to determine, Barwick says. She suggests asking yourself: “Does bed rotting feel truly restorative? Or does it just feel like you’re checking out?”