Why We Stopped Working in Bed

Working from bed became normal somewhere around 2020 and never entirely stopped. A laptop, a pillow behind you, an hour of email before getting up.

We did it for two years. It damaged both halves of the arrangement.

What it does to the sleep

Your brain builds associations from repetition. A bed used only for sleep becomes a cue for sleepiness — you get in and something starts winding down before you've decided to.

A bed used for email becomes a cue for email. It's the same mechanism that makes lying awake and frustrated so corrosive, and it's why stimulus control — keeping the bed for sleep — is a core component of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia rather than a piece of etiquette.

You are training the room. The only question is what you're training it to expect.

What it does to the work

Less discussed and equally real. Work done in bed is, in our experience, reliably worse — not because of posture but because the context is wrong. Everything you do there happens at the mental register of a place designed for switching off.

The result is a strange middle state: not resting enough to recover, not working well enough to finish. Two hours of it produces neither an hour of rest nor an hour of output.

The awkward exception

If you live in one room, this advice is easy to give and hard to take. We did, for a while.

What worked was creating a boundary that wasn't architectural: work at the table even if the table is a metre from the bed, and never with the laptop on the duvet. If the bed genuinely has to be the desk, at least change something — sit on top of the covers rather than in them, and clear the whole thing away at the end.

The association is built from repetition and context. Change enough of the context and you weaken it.

What changed for us

Two weeks, and getting into bed started producing tiredness again rather than a vague sense that something was unfinished.

Nothing else about the room changed. We just stopped asking it to do two jobs.