People Who Skip Making Their Bed Every Day Have These Traits, According to Psychology
In 2014, Admiral William H. McCraven told University of Texas graduates that if they wanted to change the world, they should start by making their bed. The speech went viral and became a book, suddenly linking morning habits and personality in the public imagination. Accomplish one small task first thing in the morning, McCraven argued, and you build momentum for the rest of the day. “If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right,” he said.
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.
‘Long Island Wise Guy’ reveals secret identity
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.