Name: How Bed Rotting Is Ruining Your Life
Uploaded: 2025-07-10T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 7 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reflexive pronouns

We already know the answer, but have you ever found yourself lying in bed for hours, not sleeping, just scrolling on your phone, binge watching shows, or kind of just existing?

That's what people are calling bedrotting.

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It's a way some of us cope when we're feeling totally drained, burnt out, or overwhelmed.

Not the most glamorous term, but pretty relatable, right?

The greatest challenge with bedrotting is that for people struggling with depression or burnout, it feels pretty good.

So when someone advises you against it, it can be difficult to actually take their advice.

The thing is, recovery from depression is not the same as recovering from a physical ailment.

Your bed is not a hospital bed, but physical health and mental health do have an effect on one another.

Poor mental health can worsen your physical health, and poor physical health can worsen your mental health.

So let's look at the signs that bedrotting is actually worsening your mental health.

In the intro, we mentioned that your bed is not a hospital bed.

In a hospital bed, your situation is temporary, and everything around your bed is there for the sake of your health.

If hospital beds are where battles for health are fought, bedrotting signifies a retreat rather than an attack.

It can start to feel more and more like your bed is the only place to be.

Going out, exercising, seeing the sun, and touching grass are all proactive activities that show you are resisting your depression, whereas staying in bed is comfortable and effortless.

The world asks a lot of us, so it's understandable that we go through periods where we just want things to feel effortless.

But too much time spent in effortless bliss is bound to become an ouroboros of things piling up, becoming more difficult, and the bed therefore looking more and more appealing.

So if you find that everything is becoming harder and your bed is becoming more irresistible, maybe it's time to pick up arms again, give life another go.

Being unable to get things done can make you feel hopeless or even afraid.

Anxiousness, born of procrastination, is common and usually gets worse the longer it goes on.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Rational, Emotive, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy tells us that the greatest thing keeping people suspended in anxiety and procrastination is rumination, rather than just worrying about it.

It's totally normal to worry about not getting things done, but by repeatedly thinking about it and telling yourself you'll be in danger if you don't do this task.

You're more likely to shut yourself away and not want to engage with it at all.

This, of course, just leads to more rumination.

So here's a strategy that might help you get out of bed and clear out some of that anxiety that's keeping you trapped.

Don't think about how many tasks you need to do or how long it's going to take.

You don't even have to finish a task just yet.

Just secure a starting point that you can return to.

If you have a lot to do, but it all depends on one specific task getting done, start there.

If it can be done in any order, start with the easiest one or even choose one randomly.

You may think you aren't bedrotting out of anxiety, but think about what it is that you're ruminating on.

Are you worried that you aren't where you should be in life?

Your career hasn't bloomed as much as you think it should have?

Find one thing that, even if it doesn't do anything helpful immediately, will at least make you feel like you're being more productive.

You most likely already knew that bedrotting is probably not great for you.

Being surrounded by snacks and a charging laptop with The Sims on 24-7 sounds like a great way to spend a weekend, but long periods without any productivity aren't great for your self-esteem.

A 2021 study found that long periods of physical inactivity was likely to worsen depression, stress, and anxiety in adolescents.

This backs up another study from 2017 that claimed students who were not only physically active, but also pursuing their goals had higher self-esteem than those who weren't.

So while your body seems to house a bottomless well of lethargy that yearns for constant rest, giving your body and mind what it thinks it wants is likely to only hurt you more.

So what's the solution if you just can't seem to do anything, but doing nothing also makes you feel worse?

Don't think you have to immediately jump out of bed and rise to your full potential.

Instead, start by practicing a bit of tough love on yourself by forcing yourself to walk around or do 10 minutes of light exercise each day.

You might just find that this starts to repair your undeniable inner fortitude, and over time, you will be reminded of just how strong and capable you are.

It won't necessarily make your depression magically go away, but it will put an end to the feeling of mental decay that bedrotting creates.

Your family and friends are worried about you.

This one might sound obvious, but it's often one of the most overlooked signs for everything.

We don't know what you're experiencing, but the people closest to you might know when something's wrong.

You might not think they actually care or that it doesn't matter,

but if someone has expressed the smallest amount of concern about how much time you spend in bed, it could mean your time spent bedrotting is affecting you more than you realize.

Not everyone will say something, and people don't always express themselves well.

Your dad might just get angry that you're spending too much time in bed.

Your friends might stop inviting you out because you've stopped saying yes.

That isn't good, but it should at least tell you that bedrotting might have more control over you than you intended, and your mental health might have gotten observably worse because of it.

It's often tempting to disregard the concern your family has for your mental health as they themselves and the family mechanisms that exist in your household could be a major factor in your depression.

But bedrotting is unlikely to mend that situation and could instead be a contributing factor in keeping you tied to a bleak situation.

Some people swear bedrotting is self-care, and sometimes after a long, busy week, a few extra hours in bed can be just what you need.

But when it turns into something more and your bed becomes a cage, it's time to start questioning how much good it's doing, if any.

Have you ever gone through an excessive period of bedrotting?

Share your experiences in the comments below.

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