Your bedroom serves all sorts of functions in your home. It’s where you sleep, sure, but it’s also where you wake up. It’s where you store your clothes, where you get ready for the day (and the night. You might watch television in your bedroom, or you might like to settle down with a book or your computer.
Regardless of what you’re doing in your bedroom, you always need it to maintain one crucial feature: coziness. A cozy room makes you feel comfortable and confident; it helps you relax and sleep, and it makes you feel more human. If you are seriously struggling to bring coziness into your bedroom, here are a few places to focus (so you won’t break the bank).
A Better Mattress and More Pillows
To make your bedroom cozier, it’s best to start with the room’s most important feature: the bed. Specifically, you should invest in a high-quality mattress — one that guarantees both physical health and mental relaxation. You can buy any size of bed mattresses almost anywhere these days, from the web to mattress stores to furniture outlets to your local thrift shop, but however you prefer to shop, here’s how you should conduct your mattress search to ensure you get a foundation of coziness:
Learn from your old bed. Consider how you feel when you lay down in your current mattress — how your body is supported in your preferred sleeping position, how you react to the mattress’s materials, how you fare with your partner’s sleep. Use these factors to guide your next mattress purchase.
Do research before you buy. Don’t believe what mattress salespeople are telling you. Use the web to understand all your options — inner spring vs. memory foam vs. adjustable air — and read reviews of fellow customers to find exactly what you want.
When you finally get a mattress, you shouldn’t skimp on the pillows. Experts say that you should be sleeping with at least two pillows but perhaps as many as four or five, depending on your sleep posture. Your goal should be to use pillows to provide extra support to your body, so you can keep your spine aligned. Plus, the more pillows you have on your bed, the cozier the room looks and feels.
Soft Textures Everywhere
No one looks at hard surfaces and sharp corners and thinks “comfy.” You can easily encourage coziness by layering your room in soft materials and textures, which creates an environment of safety and warmth. To start, you might invest in a tufted headboard — or make your own, which is more accessible for beginner DIY-ers than you might expect. Carpeting is common in bedrooms, and while you might not want to cover your walls with fabric, you can hide your walls behind fabric features, like luxurious curtains and a soft bed canopy. Other lushly upholstered furniture like a bench or reading chair will fill space, add function and improve comfort.
A Peaceful Palette
Psychologists have found that certain colors tend to trigger specific reactions in the human brain and body — but those reactions are highly dependent on cultural connections to color. For example, in Greece, yellow is the color of sadness, but nearly everywhere else in the West, it is a color of optimism and happiness. All this is to say that you should be careful with the colors you choose for your bedroom because some hues will cause you to feel energized and awake — not cozy.
The coziest color schemes tend to be subdued and somewhat neutral, falling on neither extreme of the warm-cold spectrum. Beiges, ivories and warm grays are all excellent choices for a dominant wall color because they are easily paired with bursts of color in your room’s accessories. However, if you find that you relax around brighter tones like aqua or peach, you can opt for those instead. Your goal here should be to create a palette of colors that make you relax and feel comfortable, so you should focus on your preferences over anyone else’s opinions.
Low Layers of Light
Finally, you don’t need your bedroom to be the brightest room in the house. The body’s circadian rhythm is highly affected by light, even artificial light, so you can do damage to your ability to relax by installing too many too-bright lights where you hope to calm down and sleep.
However, that’s not to say that your bedroom should be as dark as a cave; you need lights to see by, and you should invite daylight into your bedroom to balance your circadian rhythm. Still, instead of installing one overpowering overhead light, consider a pair of table lamps around your bed and perhaps wall sconces or other lights about eye-level around the rest of the room. You should also keep your lights on dimmers, so you can adjust the ambiance to your precise needs.
Coziness is as much a state of mind as it is a physical experience. By modifying your bedroom to address how you prefer to relax and unwind, you can create the ultimate cute and cozy space for you.