I just learned a new word—sleepmaxxing, a viral wellness trend that takes good, old-fashioned sleep hygiene to an extreme. It was coined in late 2024 and gained viral traction in 2025. I am, therefore, almost 2 years late.
Like anything viral and trendy nowadays, proponents get almost obsessive about behavioral and environmental habits they practice in order to achieve the most optimal kind of sleep possible. People are on an aggressive pursuit to achieve sleep, which is supposed to be the ultimate relaxing and restorative activity.
Your Very Own Bedroom
It is a luxury to have a dedicated sanctuary that offers you total privacy and personal freedom. There would be no need to compromise with anyone so you can do what you feel like doing before going to bed. No one tsk-tsking beside you because she wants the reading lamp off (even if it’s on your side of the bed) while you want to finish reading a chapter. Or what about wanting to sleep but your roommate has to have the television on because he needs the white noise to lull him to sleep. If you share a room with someone who produces loud, chainsaw-like snores, try to resist smothering his face with a pillow.
A clean and comfortable bedroom all to yourself is a blessing. You can organize it any way you want to. You can go to bed when you want. You can control the temperature in the room, at 16°C if you’re the polar bear type. Have blackout curtains because sunshine streaming in at 5:30 is not your idea of a good morning greeting. You can organize your things the way you like using the Konmari method or be as happy as a pig in mud and freely express your authentic messy, chaotic self. Most enjoyable of all is you can take up all the space in bed and sprawl out like a happy starfish.
Sharing a Bedroom
Growing up, I shared a room with my sister. She’s the one whom I displeased because I wanted to read another chapter. Since she was my ate, negotiations were not possible.
If you do share a bedroom with someone else, you need to have clear boundaries and ground rules on organization, tidiness, and quiet times. You need strict personal zones, a pillow to divide a bed is not enough. For kids, bunk beds are an easy solution. If you’re much older, having your own bed in a shared space works much better.
It’s not all dour bureaucracy with your roommate though. Sometimes, it is the whispered conversations of deep, delicious secrets shared in the dead of night. If nothing else, you can use those secrets, if boring, to mesmerize you to sleep. No need for yoga nidra.
Sleepmaxxing?
It was so much simpler when I was a kid. An adult used a much-abused Benjamin Franklin quote, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” We didn’t have gadgets then. Parents had absolute power so lights out was lights out. No negotiations with them either.
If you have to do sleepmaxxing, which means to aggressively optimize your sleep environment, use hacks, drink supplements, buy some gadgets, follow numerous rituals, and come up with all kinds of bizarre strategies just to improve your sleep, that cannot be optimal. You’ll end up with performance anxiety, in my opinion.
Instead, try this good, old-fashioned sleep hygiene:
- keep your bedroom tidy and comfortable, choose cool and neutral colors for your walls,
- have an early afternoon cut-off for your caffeine fix,
- eat a banana before bed and/or drink warm milk,
- shower an hour before bed time to relax your muscles…and it’s good hygiene,
- put away all screens also an hour before going to bed and leave all gadgets that emit blue light in another room.
If it helps, spray some lavender scent around the room, apply magnesium oil on the soles of your feet, calves, stomach, and shoulders 30 minutes before bed, and maybe have a white noise machine or noise-canceling earbuds if you live in a noisy neighborhood.
Finally, don’t hold on to thoughts. Don’t make a story. Just acknowledge each thought and bid it Godspeed. You, too, have a journey to take, deep into dreamland.
For more tips on how to make your bedroom a place that brings you your beauty sleep, click on this link.
