Woman Shares Her Simple One-Step Method To Stop 'Bed Rotting The Day Away' On Weekends & After Work
We all need more rest and laziness, but how do you keep your bed rotting from getting out of hand? Turns out, it couldn't be simpler.
Diego Cervo / Shutterstock; Canva Pro We've all done it, some of us on every weekend — you languish in bed on a Saturday morning for so long that suddenly it's 3 p.m., a huge chunk of the weekend is gone, and there's nothing to show for it.
Quitting this pattern can feel impossible, but what if it's far easier than we think?
A TikToker shared how to stop 'bed rotting' the day away every weekend — with just one simple step.
Now, first things first. Taking time to be lazy is not just okay, it can be good for you. Bed rotting emerged as a self-care trend on TikTok for a reason: we are all, at all ages, exhausted by the demands of our jobs, school and other responsibilities.
Reveling in laziness — which is to say, simply giving yourself permission to rest — is sometimes exactly what we need.
But there can be "too much of a good thing" when it comes to bed rotting. As psychologist Dr. Emily Mudd says in the video above, bed rotting can become problematic if it's being used not for relaxation but rather for avoidance or because of anxiety.
In short, bed rotting can start to make our stress even worse if it's keeping us from doing things we actually want and need to get done. So, what then?
Raven, a TikToker known as @lifeasraven on the app, has the perfect solution, and it couldn't be more simple.
Raven says to simply name out loud the things you want to be doing, instead of bed rotting, to break the cycle.
Much of Raven's TikTok presence is devoted to all things having to do with bed rotting, and recently a follower asked her how to interrupt the cycle when you just can't seem to finally, at last, get yourself out of bed on the weekend.
She explained a pitfall of bed rotting that will be instantly familiar to so many of us. "The issue with rotting is that on the outside, it looks like nothing," she said. "But on the inside, in your head, a lot is going on. You're actively thinking about all the stuff that you have to do, but you're not doing. You're thinking, oh, my gosh, there goes another hour that passed me doing nothing."
Yep, that's basically why it recently took me a whole month of weekends to finally clean my stove and do a bunch of other small but necessary tasks that take all of 10 minutes. I just kept running out of time each weekend... sort of.
"The problem? It's all trapped in your head," Raven said. And what helps her break that cycle is simply "bringing it out of your head," by which she means: "You need to literally say out loud to yourself what you want to do."
The idea is that by staying in your head, you basically succumb to inertia. "But if [the things you want to do] get out here in the real world where stuff happens, if you put the words out there in the physical space, that disrupts your cycle," she added.
Once you've identified what you want to do out loud, Raven suggests starting small and working your way up. "I'm going to stand up, 54321 my feet are moving," she said. "My feet are touching the ground... because then your mind and body's like, whoa, wait, this is happening," Raven explained. "This is for real."
Scientific studies say that Raven's method is not just good advice for how to stop bed rotting, but for managing stress and anxiety in general, too.
Raven's advice makes so much sense because it turns out she's actually onto something from a scientific perspective, too.
Psychologists have found that "talking to ourselves" can actually enhance the benefits of common concepts like "self-talk" and our "internal monologues," which can help us with everything from motivation, focus and critical thinking to, yes, stress reduction. Basically everything we need to get us up out of the bed and into our day after some bed rotting.
Scientists have also found that voicing our anxieties can help us reframe them into motivation or even excitement, which works because anxiety and excitement are physiologically the same experience and rely on similar brain chemicals.
So saying out loud, "I want to go for a walk," or whatever the case may be, really can hack your brain out of the bed-rotting-the-day-away feedback loop and help you turn overwhelm into action.
And for those times when you really do need to just languish in bed for a huge chunk of the day, Raven also has a plan for that: several of what she calls "No Rot Agendas" to get you up and on your feet to tackle the day, but only after two solid hours of bed rotting. Now, that's what you call self-care!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.