Pillows Contain Dead Bugs and Their Poop
Photo: Courtesy.
Have you ever found a spider in your bed? Crawling across your sheets and invading the safe, soft haven that is your bed? It's horrifying. If finding a creepy crawly monster in your bed haunts your nightmares, we have some terrible news for you. Seriously — terrible. It turns out your pillow is basically a disgusting sack of bugs and their poop.
According to research from the science and technology company Dow, pillows turn into bug body and poo repositories after two years of use. In fact, after two years, one-third of you pillow's weight is dead skin, bug corpses, dust mites and bug poop. Feeling sleepy? We're not either.
Related: 5 Ways Not Getting Enough Sleep Completely Messes With Your Brain
If you're horrified by this, join the club. But, if you're thinking that you've lived this far sleeping on your old, dusty bug bag so it's probably not hurting you, you might not be totally right. According to Dow's research,10% of all people and 80% of people with allergies are allergic to the bug corpses laid to rest in your pillow. So that poop sack you get so cozy in might actually be giving you allergies. Anything that interferes with your ability to get a good night's rest is an issue, especially since we know that lack of sleep can lead to depression, can make it harder to do your school work, and could increase your risk for a car crash. According to Dow, people who don't sleep enough are six times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, and sleeping fewer than six hours per night could increase your chance of heart disease by 48%.
So, we know sleeping is super important, but the things that we sleep on could be making us sick. Since we're definitely not getting rid of pillows altogether, it seems like some pillow hygiene lessons are in order. The New York Post reports you should wash your pillows every six months, and your pillow cases every week.
This story originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
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