Screw Moderation. I Wanna Feel Something
Wintertime blues, reframing what it means to rot, and grounding myself in my emotions
“I had so much fun today! Hope you have time to decompose this weekend,” I texted my friend after spending the day with her. We’ve always sent each other texts after a hang out sesh, like coworkers giving each other performance reviews. It just seems like the polite thing to do.
“HAHAHAHA honestly same,” she texted back, “I’d love to decompose back into the earth”.
I knew I’d used the wrong word, but the word I was looking for (decompress) completely eluded my mind. I could not, for the life of me, think of what it was I meant to say, but I knew she’d understand either way. Years later, even before “bed rotting” came onto the scene, I continue to say “decompose”. It just feels right. I guess you could say I was ahead of the game.
Bed rotting, as the trend has been coined, is simply a more dramatic way of saying resting. Instead of giving yourself a day of rest, you let yourself “rot in bed”. It’s supposed to be a way of turning away from work culture and recentering our lives on taking care of ourselves. But of course, just like anything, the trend has received a lot of backlash. As soon as it started gaining traction, the experts started warning against it with an article from Health even citing psychologist Courtney DeAngelis, who says “‘I would caution that less is more when it comes to the concept of bed rotting, and doing this in moderation is important’”. It’s also been used to poke at Gen Z, questioning whether or not this is self-care or just laziness.
I want to roll my eyes so hard at this, they might actually get stuck. I’ll have to walk around with only the whites of my eyes showing for the rest of my life, my mom’s warnings from when I was a child ringing in my ears for all eternity: “summer, stop making that face or it’ll get stuck”. I’ll have finally proved her right, but I’m just so tired of always being told to do everything in moderation. I’ve lived my life in moderation.
A little bit goes a long way.
It’s true. A little bit really does go a long way, and of course, you don’t want to over do it on bed rotting. Honestly, in some cases, it even seems like a romanticization of mental illness. The possible threats of overindulging in bed rotting or anything, for that matter, are real. But I guess I hadn’t realized we as a society had gotten to the point that we always have to be warned about the potential risks of doing practically anything. Maybe that’s idealistic, or maybe it’s just stupid. I don’t know.
There are a lot of ways one could view bed rotting: lazy, refreshing, problematic. But with the winter season officially in full swing, laying in bed within the warmth of layers of blankets, seems like a gift. It also seems to perfectly coincide with our post-holiday, wintertime blues.
Honestly, January and February were always my least favorite months of the year. The cold weather makes it so hard to get up in the morning. No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite seem to drag myself out of the warmth of my flannel sheets any earlier than 9 o’clock; my mind always wandering back into the numbing bliss of nothingness, whispering: just a little longer. It makes me feel lazy and sad and unproductive. I’m so much more aware of how I feel in the winter—the aches and pains burning in my chest, down to the pit of my stomach.
I hate it so much.
I’ve never been one to indulge in my feelings, although I wish I would. Honestly, I’m jealous of all the girlies who can reach down into their gut and pull out their innermost emotions with ease. Who cry and yell and scream with anger or excitement laced in every word. Whenever I watch anything that expresses female rage—like Olivia Rodrigo’s performance of “all-american bitch” on SNL—it just feels so cathartic. Female rage in movies, TV shows, and even songs, has become especially popular in recent years; partly because of things happening in the real world, but I also think we’re collectively growing tired of it all. Tired of being told “women don’t get angry” or that it’s “unbecoming” to show our anger, but when we don’t we’re “too cold” and we when we do we’re “too emotional”.
It’s tiring, walking that line. Sometimes I feel like a circus act—a clown with my face painted into a smile and a tear dripping out of one eye, unsure which emotion to express. But even in my most private moments, I can’t always find the courage to let myself feel my emotions. I always turn to a book, my phone, or let myself slip into the dark comfort of sleep.
Bed rotting, though giving us permission to rest, also gives us the permission to binge TV shows and scroll mindlessly on our phones. Of course we deserve to turn off and relax after a long day or after completing a difficult task. We deserve to tune out of this capitalistic hellscape in which productivity has become our purpose, but with consumption as our escape, I’m not so sure it’s possible to ever truly get away. Especially when it’s used to numb us against our emotions.
***
When I was a little girl, I used to cry over any little thing. If I fell and scraped my knee, I’d burst into tears so violently you’d think I was dying, or at least broke something. I’m not sure at what point this stopped, but eventually it became the opposite. I counted my bruises like trophies I was proud to have won, and prided myself on my lack of tears as I pulled out a loose tooth, blood dripping between my fingers and nails. Eventually, I could no longer remember the last time I’d cried.
All my life, I’ve been told that I’m “level-headed”, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve become too level-headed. If I’ve grown too accustomed to neutrality to let myself feel one way or another—too used to living in moderation. And it’s funny because this is often attributed to being “down to earth” when, actually, I’ve found the opposite to be true. Nature is both harsh and gentle, terrifying and peaceful, destructive and healing. It has balance because it is both, not because it is neither.
Nowadays, it’s so easy to confuse indifference with balance. A person can appear to have mastered the art of moderation when, really, they’ve just become so apathetic they can’t remember what it’s like to care about something. As much as I hate to side with the experts that crawled out of their minimalist offices to warn us against bed rotting, I don’t think numbing ourselves with content that passes straight through us will do any good.
But bed rotting isn’t the problem. Laying in bed and giving yourself time to rest, to work through your emotions is a good thing. It breaks my heart that, somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that things like lying in bed and crying after an especially hard day makes us weak, or even lazy. Whenever I’ve let myself cry, I always feel like I can see more clearly. But when I’ve been scrolling on my phone or distracting myself with easily digestible content, I feel disconnected. Like I’ve floated out of my body, and I’m simply watching from a distance. I’m so tired of it. I’m tired of this apathetic existence. I want to care until hurts.
So, this winter, I will be letting myself rot. I’ll be going to bed earlier and reading books that make me so angry I slam them shut or so sad I cry myself to sleep. I’ll watch movies that dredge up old feelings and help me better understand new ones while I sit underneath the covers, sipping my tea. I’ll listen to songs with the most depressing lyrics late at night because they make me feel less alone. I’m going to let myself feel everything because I’d so much rather feel all of that than feel nothing. I want to take advantage of the slowness of winter to reconnect with my emotions, to ground myself in them. I want to decompose until the earth mistakes my rotting soul as just another part of her, so beautifully messy that even the moss starts to grow across my body, welcoming me back.
If you want more on bed rotting and wintertime blues, check out
’s Substack! Specifically the article “hot girls rot in bed on sundays”, which is one of my all time favorite reads from her. I also highly recommend her movie lists, especially “films for the winter blues”, which covers some of the best movies to watch for getting into your feels this winter.If you enjoyed this, I also wrote about something somewhat similar a few weeks ago in my article “And A Messy New Year Too!” in which I discuss the pressures of the new year, wanting to lean in to the messiness of life, and learning to embrace imperfection in a healthy way.
☁️I would love to know…☁️
Have you heard of bed rotting? What do you think of it? Have you tried it?
Do you watch sad movies or listen to sad songs in the winter?
What’s your fav female rage movie/scene from media?
I'm definitely a bed rotting advocate, I just wish it was ,for example, less scrolling more reading. I know that personally I feel comfortable not well rested when I scroll in bed for hours there's a lot of other things you can do while rotting;sleeping, journaling,colouring, even crocheting, that will benefit more than doom scrolling. Especially as a creative allowing yourself to sit and do nothing is extremely beneficial but scrolling and binge watching can be pretty tasking for the brain.
It'll leave you feeling exhausted and that's without considering the other emotions reading the comment section on reels or ticktock, hearing snipets of incel podcasts, and seeing another microtrend pop up will bring you.
I just feel like our time online should be associated less with rest.
I hadn’t heard of bed rotting before. It sounds like a perfect habit for me. And a beautiful way you have talked about judgement of women and emotions - whether they are showing them or not and whether this is a good or bad thing. Perhaps those judging could try a bit more bed rotting