The message stuck because it confirmed what tidy people already believed about themselves, but it left everyone else wondering if their rumpled sheets were evidence of some deeper failing. Psychologists have spent the last decade studying exactly this question, and their findings push back against the morality tale. A 2018 survey of 2,000 Americans by OnePoll and Sleepopolis found that people who skip making their beds aren’t disorganized disasters. They’re curious and sarcastic night owls who tend to work in business and finance and prefer rock music to jazz, Seinfeld to House Hunters.
Whether you fold hospital corners or leave your duvet in a heap. The choice says something about how you relate to structure, control, and your own internal rhythms. The psychology behind those differences turns out to be more interesting than any viral commencement speech.
The Science of Sleep Personalities
To understand why some people make their beds, and others don’t, you need two pieces of vocabulary from personality psychology. Chronotype refers to your body’s natural preference for when to sleep and wake. Some people are morning types who pop out of bed at sunrise. While others are evening types who do their best thinking after midnight. This isn’t a lifestyle choice but something substantially genetic, influenced by clock genes including PER3, CLOCK, and others that regulate circadian rhythms.
The second piece is the Big Five, a framework psychologists use to measure personality across five dimensions. These are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Decades of research have shown these traits predict everything from job performance to relationship satisfaction to how long you’ll live.
A 2024 systematic review in Nature and Science of Sleep analyzed studies involving over 58,000 participants and found that chronotype and personality are tightly linked. Conscientiousness, the trait measuring self-discipline and orderliness, correlates most strongly with being a morning person, with effect sizes between 0.16 and 0.35 across cultures and age groups. This connection runs deeper than behavior because conscientiousness and chronotype share genetic roots.
So when someone skips making their bed, they’re not simply being lazy. They’re expressing a constellation of traits, some of them hardwired, that shape how they move through the world.
Night Owls Are Not Lazy
People who skip making their beds tend to be night owls, according to the survey. They hit the snooze button, drag themselves out of bed after the alarm has gone off multiple times, and get moving about 16 minutes later than their bed-making counterparts, who often wake up without an alarm at all.
The difference isn’t about willpower. Every brain runs on an internal clock that controls when you feel alert and when you feel tired, and that clock doesn’t tick at the same pace for everyone. Morning people start suppressing melatonin around 6 a.m., so waking up feels natural. Night owls are still producing the hormone at 7 a.m., which is why the alarm feels like an assault. Their circadian rhythms run later. Not because they stayed up too late scrolling their phones. But because their biology operates on a delayed schedule.
Running on a Different Clock
A 2017 study by researchers at the University of Tübingen and the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim found that evening types take longer to fall asleep once they get into bed, a measure sleep scientists call sleep latency, and they sleep more on weekends than morning types do because they’re paying back the debt they rack up during the workweek. When your body wants to rest at 1 a.m. but your alarm is set for 7 a.m., something has to give. For many night owls, bed-making is the first thing to go.
People who skip the ritual often do so because mornings already demand energy for more urgent things like getting ready for work, preparing breakfast, or catching an early commute. The bed loses because it’s low on the priority list, not because these people lack discipline.
A 2021 study by researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Tartu examined 2,515 Estonian adults using both personality assessments and DNA samples and found that people who score lower on self-discipline tend to have later chronotypes. The causation may run both ways, but the correlation holds. Night owls look lazy by morning-person standards, but they’re running on a different clock entirely.
The Curiosity Connection
Non-bed-makers were labeled “curious” and “sarcastic” in the survey, which sounds like a polite way of calling someone difficult. Psychologists would call it openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality dimensions that measures how much someone seeks novelty, tolerates ambiguity, and engages with abstract ideas. People who score high on this trait tend to be imaginative and intellectually restless. They get bored with routine and seek stimulation. Which might explain why they’d rather leave the bed unmade and move on to something more interesting.
The Tübingen and the Central Institute of Mental Health research also found that openness correlated with eveningness, and the Estonian genetic study went further, showing that the link between openness and late chronotypes has a biological basis. People who score high on openness aren’t just choosing to stay up late because they’re watching one more episode or falling down internet rabbit holes. Their biology nudges them toward novelty-seeking behavior, and evening hours offer fewer interruptions for pursuing whatever has captured their attention.
These types of people are usually high in openness and are less bothered by messiness in their environments. They don’t experience the same cognitive relief from tidying up that conscientious types report. What looks like laziness to an outside observer feels like rational prioritization to someone whose brain is already scanning for the next interesting problem to solve.
Curiosity and sarcasm might not win you points with Admiral McCraven, but these stable personality traits fuel creativity and intellectual engagement. The unmade bed is just one expression of it.
The Creativity Connection
Many creative thinkers find comfort in a little chaos, and this isn’t just folk wisdom. Research on physical environments and cognition supports the idea that disorder can prime the brain for original thinking.
A 2013 study published in Psychological Science asked participants to brainstorm new uses for ping pong balls. Those who worked in cluttered rooms generated ideas that independent judges rated as more creative than those produced by participants in tidy rooms, with 5 times as many ideas deemed “highly creative.” The researchers, led by Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota, concluded that orderly environments encourage convention and playing it safe. While disorderly ones signal that breaking from the norm is acceptable. An unmade bed isn’t a ping pong ball experiment, but the principle translates. When your surroundings say rules don’t matter here, your brain might follow suit.
The Sleepopolis survey found non-bed-makers concentrated in business and finance, fields that reward strategic thinking and calculated risk. Night owls make up another segment of the unmade-bed population, and they show up disproportionately in creative professions. The research notes that evening types may have more aptitude for creative thinking, though the direction of causation remains unclear. Do creative people become night owls, or does being a night owl create conditions that nurture creativity?
None of this means you need a cluttered room to be creative. But it does suggest that people who leave their beds unmade aren’t missing some essential life skill. They may be trading one form of order for another kind of cognitive freedom.
The Conscientiousness Question
Conscientiousness is the Big Five personality trait most associated with bed-making, and it’s where the moral judgment tends to creep in. Conscientious people show up on time, keep their word, and finish what they start. Research links high conscientiousness to better health outcomes, longer life, and greater career success. So what does it mean if you’re lower on this trait?
Less than you might think. Meta-analyses on personality and chronotype have found that conscientiousness accounts for roughly 7% to 12% of the variance in whether someone is a morning or evening person. That’s a real effect, but it also means 88% to 93% of the variance comes from other factors. Being a non-bed-maker doesn’t make you unconscientious any more than making your bed makes you a model citizen.
Kelly McMenamin, an organization expert and co-founder of PixiesDidIt, has spent years working with clients to understand how different personality types relate to tidiness. She estimates that only about 40% of the population actually needs external order to feel mentally clear, a group she calls Classics. The rest don’t experience the same cognitive benefit from a made bed.
“Non-bed-makers don’t need to-do lists to get things done,” McMenamin told Bustle. “And their homes are often more cluttered, but leaving the bed unmade has no negative effect on their mental clarity.” For people wired this way, skipping the morning tuck isn’t laziness. It’s just irrelevant to how their brains organize the day ahead.
The Mental Health Angle
Evening chronotypes face a structural disadvantage in a world built around morning schedules. Schools start early, offices open at 9, and social norms treat early risers as virtuous while dismissing night owls as lazy. Researchers call this clash between internal biology and external schedules social jet lag, and it takes a measurable toll on mental health.
A 2022 study in Chronobiology International found that eveningness is associated with higher depressive symptoms. Particularly among people who are also high in neuroticism or low in conscientiousness. The researchers argued that chronotype should be considered in both the prevention and diagnosis of mood disorders. A separate study drawing on samples from the UK and Germany reached similar conclusions, finding that evening chronotype correlates with depression, stress, and difficulty organizing thoughts.
This doesn’t mean skipping your bed-making will send you into a depressive spiral. But the traits associated with non-bed-making exist in a context that can be hard on mental health. Night owls aren’t just battling their alarm clocks. They’re living in a society that wasn’t designed for them.
The good news is that awareness helps. Research on chronotype and well-being consistently shows that aligning your schedule with your natural rhythms improves mood and life satisfaction. Morning people benefit from early starts, and evening people benefit from later ones. The problem isn’t being a night owl. It’s being a night owl forced to live like a lark.
The Part Nobody Mentions
Psychology says that our daily rituals say something about who we are. Making your bed might make you feel organized and accomplished. While leaving it unmade might help you feel free and creative. Neither answer is wrong, and it depends on what nurtures your sense of peace.
The research supports this view. Personality traits like conscientiousness and openness exist on a spectrum, and where you fall shapes how you respond to structure and routine. Chronotype is largely genetic, which means your body has its own preferences about when to sleep and wake. Fighting those preferences in the name of productivity often backfires. The goal isn’t to force yourself into habits that don’t fit but to understand your own wiring and work with it rather than against it.
If making your bed gives you momentum, keep doing it. If it feels like a pointless chore that eats into your already-rushed morning, maybe it’s not the keystone habit that Admiral McCraven promised. [The 2,000-person survey, the genetic studies, and the personality research all point to the same conclusion]. Non-bed-makers aren’t broken. They’re different. They’re curious, flexible, and comfortable with a little disorder. They stay up late, think creatively, and prioritize in ways that don’t always show up in a tidy bedroom.
Your sheets don’t determine your destiny. How you understand yourself might.
