The message resonated because it confirmed what tidy people already believed about themselves. But it left everyone else wondering whether rumpled sheets were evidence of a deeper failing. Psychologists have spent years studying exactly that 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 are not disorganized disasters. They tend to be curious, sarcastic night owls who work in business and finance and prefer rock music to jazz. The portrait is specific enough to suggest that something more systematic than laziness is at work.
Genetics and the Big Five: why chronotype is not a lifestyle choice
To understand the bed-making divide, two concepts from personality psychology are essential. The first is chronotype — your body’s genetically influenced preference for when to sleep and wake. Clock genes including PER3 and CLOCK regulate circadian rhythms, meaning that being a morning or evening person is substantially hardwired, not simply a matter of discipline.
The second is the Big Five personality framework, which measures openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. A 2024 systematic review in Nature and Science of Sleep analyzed studies involving over 58,000 participants and found that 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.
Critically, the review found that conscientiousness and chronotype share genetic roots. When someone skips making their bed, they are not simply being lazy. They are expressing a cluster of traits, some of them hardwired, that shape how they move through the day.
The Big Five and chronotype: a quick primer
The Big Five is the dominant framework in personality psychology, measuring five stable dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Chronotype — your biological preference for morning or evening — is substantially genetic, regulated by clock genes such as PER3 and CLOCK. Research consistently shows these two systems overlap, meaning that personality and sleep timing are not entirely independent choices.
