What I learned from 4 Months of Sleeping on the floor

Why I Slept on the Floor for 3 Months

For the last 3 months, much to the mockery of my friends and family, I’ve been sleeping on the floor. And I got this idea from an anthropologist called Katie Bowman, who looked at the fact that in the West, we’re always so achy. We’ve got back problems and knee problems and we’re tired all the time. And looked at what our habits are compared to African tribesmen, which have much lower rates of muscular skeletal problems.

The main differences she found were the fact that tribesmen sleep on hard floors and they walk around all day. Whereas in the West, we get up from our big plush marshmallow beds and go and sit like a little goblin at our desks all day and then repeat. And she’s like, hm, maybe that’s why we’re in pain all the time and they’re not, which is I thought, you know what, fair point.

The Benefits

Sleep Quality Unchanged

There has been no reduction in my quality of sleep. I don’t think it’s fair to say that I’m sleeping better or worse because I used to sleep well and I still sleep well. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night for no reason and I didn’t before. So you could toe that up as a benefit if you want to.

Eliminating Bed Lounging

Sleeping on the floor stops you entering waistman mode and like working in bed and just lounging around in bed. Normally when you have a proper bed, it’s at sitting height and so it’s very easy to just sit there for a moment and just start lounging around and just being a waste man. Whereas on the floor it’s much less of an attractive prospect and it feels silly to like lie all the way down on your bed to be a waste man. So it’s eliminated that entirely.

Natural Waking

The other thing that it’s almost eliminated is having to use an alarm clock to wake up. I still use one for security purposes. You don’t want to just turn up to work late, but 80 to 90% of the time I am up before my alarm goes off, which is a change from when I slept on a bed. I don’t know why this is, but it certainly has happened in the last 3 months while sleeping on the floor compared to a bed.

Reduced Morning Stiffness

My back is less stiff in the mornings. I’m not claiming that it’s cured long-term back problems and issues with disc herniation and so on, but it certainly has meant that I’m not as stiff. I’m not waking up in the morning like actively in pain. So is it worth getting rid of your bed for? Maybe if you have joint problems, it’s worth testing out before you get rid of your bed entirely. Maybe test sleeping on the floor next to your bed for a few days and notice if you feel much of a difference.

The Downsides

The Burpee Problem

Getting out of bed requires you literally to do a burpee. Now, if that’s the first thing that you have to do when your consciousness enters your body in the morning and you’re like, “Ah, got to do a burpee to get up.” That’s not a great state of affairs.

No Comfort or Luxury

Sleeping on the floor doesn’t feel like you’re being cradled or pampered. It doesn’t feel like a luxury. It forces you to do the work to relax into the floor. And in a way, that’s quite good because like they say, you can’t drill a tooth with a marshmallow. You need to then cause you yourself to relax into the floor rather than allowing anything to do that work for you.

If you’re sleeping on a big soft plush mattress, it’s much easier to hold on to tension in the body because there’s nothing that forces you to open it out into the floor. Whereas when you are on the floor, if you were to stay tight, you’re just going to increase the pressure on certain parts of your body rather than opening up fully and flattening your body into the floor and allowing it to take the shape of the floor.

Relationship and Mold

It has not been popular with the girlfriend. So, if you are in a relationship, good luck trying to convince your partner that sleeping on the floor with them is going to be a fun prospect. So, unless you’re both up for it, prepare for some arguments.

When you’re sleeping on something like this, there is no air circulation below the bed, and so there is the chance of more mold accumulating underneath the surface that you’re sleeping on.

What I’m Actually Sleeping On

Just to give you guys an idea of what I am sleeping on, this is just a regular duvet with an IKEA mattress topper. It’s about 5 or 6 cm thick. It’s just made of soft foam just to cushion the joints from being bruised from sleeping directly on the floor. So that is a bit thinner than actually what Katie Bowman herself uses. Otherwise, I’m using thin pillows. This is a sort of shaped one, but it’s very, very soft. So it’s just to provide a little bit of elevation for the head.

Final Verdict

Will I continue sleeping on the floor? Probably not. Although there have been some benefits and some upsides to the last few months, most of those are conferred just by sleeping on a hard surface rather than the floor itself. And the downsides to sleeping on the floor are obviously the daily morning burpee and the fact that mold can accumulate from the lack of circulation. So I think eventually I’m going to move on to keeping the same hard surface but sleeping on a bed.

Grounding and EMF

Some people claim that sleeping on the floor as well helps with grounding, discharging some excess electrical current into the floor and helping you to feel more connected with the earth. Now, there are some neuro-physiological benefits to grounding, which is interesting, but sleeping on a floor in this case isn’t going to work because it’s not a conductive surface. And some say that if you try and do it in your house, if anything, you actually act as an antenna for all of the local EMF, all of the Wi-Fi waves and that kind of thing to transmit through you. So it might actually be worse if you use a grounding mat.

Tips for Hard Surface Sleeping

• Use a pillow between your legs if you’re a side sleeper – that aligns your pelvis and stops it from sinking sideways into the bed.
• Take a pillow, hold it under your neck and between your shoulders so it’s wedged in between there. Retract the shoulder blade and then sleep on your side. This way your head is fully neutral and your pelvis is fully neutral. So you are lying basically in a fully straight line without sinking or rising.