Have you come across posts on your feed that encourage you to stay in bed? A trending social media phenomenon called “bed rotting” has many wondering how beneficial this form of self-care is to your health.
Coined on TikTok, bed rotting has influenced social media and gone viral, amassing over 50 million views with the hashtag #bedrotting. This trend promotes the idea of treating yourself by recouping and calming your body from the stress and exhaustion of the day.
Bed rotting involves staying in bed all day, scrolling on social media, snacking, relaxing and binge-watching your favorite TV shows. Overall, it is taking a break from life. This mental interlude allows for a time without outside expectations or pressure — a time to rot. Bed rotting rejects the constant need to be productive.
This recent recognition of lounging in bed validates individual’s desires to lay around without feeling guilty and permits us to accept that rotting in bed is not just a choice to be lazy, but a response to working hard.
Recharging our batteries can be considered sluggish and fruitless when, in reality, it is a way to recover and prevent burnout, according to Clinical Psychologist Nicole Hollingshead of Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
While everyone needs time to unwind, this latest self-care trend can do more harm than good. Staying in bed for hours can negatively affect your mental and physical health.
Long periods in isolation are not good for your well-being, according to mental health experts at The Healthy. Although rotting in bed can be helpful, problems arise with the inability to practice self-restraint. Overdoing it causes more problems than you started with. Rotting in bed is a form of escapism; dissociating from reality to avoid your issues, while allowing your outside problems to grow.
Engaging in fewer activities during the day can fuel a cycle of depression and anxiety. When rotting in bed becomes a habitual pattern, it could be a sign of mental health issues, and it is crucial not to let this get out of hand.
Bed-rotting can impact your sleep schedule, according to Dr. Dianne Augelli, a sleep medicine specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Augelli emphasized that using your bed for passive activities can lead to problems initiating sleep or your brain’s ability to shut down. It can take longer to quiet the mind and fall asleep as bed rotting becomes recurrent.
So, how do we utilize bed rotting in our favor? What is the best way to sustain a busy life by allowing us to breathe without getting wrapped in an unbreakable pattern? The key is balance and moderation.
Many practices can help people rot in bed responsibly. Setting timers on your phone can help you control and utilize time spent in bed. Having an allotted time during the day to rot can put your mind at ease. Planning out when you can relax during the day might seem tedious, but it allows time to decompress while leaving space to be productive.
Bed rotting needs to be approached with mindfulness and intention. There are alternatives to recharging and decompressing other than staying in bed. Practices such as yoga can produce similar results with its incorporation of meditation and breathing, which reduces stress and negative thoughts by relaxing the mind.
Learning to recharge peacefully is essential because rotting in bed is more than staying in all day. It normalizes and sustains our everyday addiction to technology. The term bed rotting has become popular because it justifies and pokes fun at how much we’re on our phones.
It’s branded as a relatable form of relaxation after a long day and something to look forward to. However, it encourages the idea that the only way to unwind is by gluing our eyes to a screen.
This trend is part of the movement that has pushed once private matters online into a collective conversation, encouraging feelings of togetherness and unity.
Overall, it promotes the intentional aspect of doing nothing. While kicking back can start as self-care, it can soon become a constant cycle of lying in bed to cope with feelings of avoidance and anxiety. Bed rotting can lead to solely relying on happiness from online interactions without proper moderation.
The phrase self-care has been so normalized that we encourage and give in to guilty pleasures that are not necessarily healthy and do not benefit us. TikTok reveals the toxic side of mental wellness; bed rotting can be beneficial in the short term but does not fit the bill for self-care.
