How To Clean Your Bed Like a Pro

Part of your essential hygiene is your bed, and properly cleaning your bed is a crucial step to maintaining a healthy and comfortable sleeping environment. For instance, a fresh and clean bed minimizes odors, dust mites, or bed bugs, and allergens that all can irritate your skin and or your breathing. Washing your sheets is a great step to cleaning your bed, but most people stop there. Your mattress should be taken care of as much as your sheets and pillows.

The Importance of Cleaning Your Bed

There are multiple benefits to cleaning your bed regularly. For example, a fresh and clean bed supports your health better by reducing sweat, allergens, including dust, and bacteria. Because, if you don’t clean your mattress, over time the accumulated amount of sweat and bacteria coming from your dead skin cells, hair, moisture, body oils, dust mites, bed bugs, all can lead to trouble breathing, allergies, and or skin irritation. Therefore, in order to protect your immune system, you need to make it a habit to clean your bed while keeping your environment neat, which contributes to the durability of your mattress, helping it last longer. In addition, to improve your sleep quality, invest some time in cleaning your mattress, whether changing your sheets and pillows, refreshing your mattress, washing your blankets, or even as simple as spraying a refreshing mattress mist, can all elevate your sleep quality by inviting you into a more comfortable, soft, and relaxing environment suitable to regulate your body and de-stress. Hence, a clean mattress plays a huge role in affecting your well-being, energy, and mood. Most of the time, it is a key determinant of how your day will go.

Read more: How to Choose the Perfect Pillow

Step-by-Step Guide on Cleaning Your Bed

Step 1: Remove and Wash All Bedding: to start your cleaning process, remove all your pillows, sheets, blankets, duvet covers, and mattress protectors. Then, you need to wash them in hot water to help kill bacteria, bed bugs, or any built-up substances. Make sure you use a moderate amount of laundry detergent, which preferably should be fragrance-free, to limit any skin irritations.

Step 2: Vacuum Your Mattress: While using a small, gentle head attachment to your vacuum, begin by vacuuming the whole surface of your mattress, and go back for all the edges, seams, and corners, since dust and bacteria are more prone to accumulate in such areas.

Step 3: Treating Stains: It is best to spot clean stains using homemade remedies to avoid any toxins and chemicals found in store-bought materials. Thus, for simple stains, you can use a mixture of water and a tiny amount of laundry detergent. Apply the mixture on your stain while using a light cloth, since direct application can make the mattress absorb too much liquid, and the moisture can grow mold. Afterwards, leave the mixture for a couple of minutes, then you can go back in and gently rub using an old toothbrush. While the same cleaning process goes for deeper, more challenging stains, the mixture differs. Combine some baking soda and white vinegar to treat such stubborn stains, and since it is a safe home-made solution, you can go for another round, in case the stain is still visible.

Step 4: Use Baking Soda: to deep clean your mattress, and ensure all odors, body oils, and moisture are gone. Sprinkle some baking soda on top of your mattress, and allow it to sit for a couple of hours so that it absorbs all the chemicals. Later, you can simply vacuum it and proceed with refreshing it.

Step 5: Air Out Your Mattress The last natural step you need to take is setting your mattress near a window or under direct sunlight to let it breathe, since fresh air helps naturally kill the bacteria and odors. This step can be done alone if you have a busy schedule, yet you still don’t want to fully sacrifice the health of your mattress and your sleep quality.

Extra Steps to Take to Maintain the Health of Your Mattress:

Other than building the healthy habit of cleaning your bed like a pro, consider taking some extra steps from time to time to expand your mattress functionality and better your sleep. For instance, rotating your mattress regularly every 3 to 6 months supports the cushioning and limits your mattress from sagging and having dents. Similarly, consider applying a mattress protector to act as a barrier between your mattress and direct contact with dead skin cells, body oils, dust, and more. In addition, changing your sheets weekly, including your pillow cases, adds to the hygiene and cleanliness of your bed while limiting the accumulation of germs on your mattress, which can all cause discomfort and irritate your sleep.