If you work from home and can place your desk anywhere, don’t let it be the bedroom, experts have warned. Doing so could be damaging your health – and more than a fifth of workers are guilty of the habit, according to a recent survey by Get Laid Beds.
It might be comfy, or convenient, but working from your room could be damaging your body and your sleep pattern. Experts have stressed people who work from their beds could struggle to sleep, due to back, neck, and wrist problems caused by their positioning while working.
Not only this but turning your bed into your office can trigger a number of other health problems, both psychological and physical. The more time you spend in bed awake, the harder it can be to swift off and wind down at night. This is because you start to associate your bed with wakefulness, not restfulness.
Charli Davies, founder and CEO of Snuzzze, said you should always choose a desk over your bed, and explained: “We often think that bringing our laptops into bed at the start or end of the day boosts our productivity, but this habit can actually harm our long-term productivity. It disrupts our sleep and causes us to lose track of time, leading to late nights and less rest.
“Having a desk in the bedroom or keeping your laptop on the nightstand can create an unintentional association between your bedroom and work, rather than sleep. This can affect your ability to get a good night’s rest without you even realising it.
“While working in bed might seem like a good idea occasionally, it can negatively affect the amount and quality of your sleep over time. Poor sleep quality impacts your productivity and efficiency, making it harder to make decisions, stay focused, concentrate, and regulate your mood—all of which makes working harder. Also, your neck, back, hips and more are all strained when you’re on a soft surface that encourages you to slump or sprawl.”
“Working on or in your bed is terrible for posture and can cause back and neck pain, contributing to issues like dowager’s hump. Wrist pain can be another problem since it’s hard to maintain an ergonomically correct position in bed due to the softness of the bedding and mattress.”