If you’re not showering at night, you’re basically tucking in a day’s worth of dirt with you.
Throughout my entire life, I have always been a night shower person. After hours of sitting through school, playing sports and being outside, I can physically feel the grime on my skin. The last thing I want to do is carry that filth into a place that’s supposed to be relaxing.
I’ve never understood how people can just go straight to bed after work. My bed is one of the only places that feels private, and the idea of bringing my entire day into it doesn’t sit right with me. A night shower helps me end the day, forget about stress from homework and clear my mind before bed.
Although one benefit of morning showers is that they can help wake you up, the purpose of showering at night is entirely different. It serves as a mental reset, offering one of the only moments of my day where there are no notifications, emails or pressure to respond to anything. I am able to stand in hot water and let the stress of the entire day wash off, literally.
Night showers also improve the quality of sleep by creating a feeling of closure at the end of the day, allowing me to fully relax before I prepare for the upcoming morning. Especially during later parts of the day, I feel more comfortable when my environment matches how I want to be, calm and ready to rest.
On the rare occasion that a tight schedule forces me to shower in the morning, I don’t feel the same. The day starts off with my hair dripping wet, leaving faint wet marks on my shirt — something that really irks me. Showering in the morning also requires an earlier wake-up time, sacrificing part of the precious eight hours of sleep that I need just to end up feeling dirty at the end of the day. This feels backwards — I am starting fresh only to undo it later on. Night showering happens after my responsibilities are done, and even if it pushes daily bedtimes a little later, I usually have more flexibility to adjust other evening priorities.
When I do not shower at night, my whole evening routine starts immediately feeling off. I’ll get into bed and suddenly a portion of hair will be too oily or my entire body will feel too hot. Without that concrete ending to the day, my brain refuses to shut down, and I end up extensively negotiating whether or not to get up and shower anyway.
Showering at night has become a habit and a way to separate the active parts of the day from my beauty rest. I refuse to trade sleep for such a short lasting moment of cleanliness that leaves a very predictable sense of dirtiness soon after. After adjusting daily routines to incorporate my showers in the evening, returning to a morning rush in exchange for a nighttime reset has lost all of its appeal for me.
The alarm goes off. You’re tired, you’re not fully awake and you have about 30 minutes to turn into a functional person and get ready for a long day of rigorous academic coursework. At that point, the difference between a replenishing morning and a groggy, unfocused start often comes down to one thing: whether you shower.
Although the question of whether to shower in the morning or at night might come down to personal preference, in practice, the two serve completely different purposes. Night showers may help you relax, but morning showers get you ready for the day.
The biggest advantage of morning showers is that they wake me up. Showering in the morning boosts alertness by stimulating circulation and signaling the body to wake up, not to mention washing away the bacteria and sweat produced during sleep. For busy students with the need to be immediately ready for classes or morning practices, this cleansing is absolutely necessary. And while wet hair is a nuisance, tell them to consider a hair dryer — the entire world has been using it consistently for over a century.
There’s also the basic question of starting the day clean. Even a few hours after waking up, I don’t feel refreshed. My hair’s a mess, my face and eyes are dry and I still feel like I just got out of bed. Skipping a morning shower means carrying the feeling of discomfort into a significant part of the day.
More than anything, though, morning showers are about routine. A morning shower forces you to start your day with intention. It’s one of the first decisions I make, and it sets a standard for everything that follows. Morning showers serve as an early time block, a positive action to cross off the day’s checklist, even before I set foot in a classroom. When I skip it, my mornings tend to feel rushed and an overall blur, but when I don’t, I am already a mental step ahead before I even leave the house.
As a busy high school student, I constantly have to work late in order to stay on track with all my activities. If I finish my work at midnight, does it make sense to spend more time showering and cut into my sleeping time? I can control the time that I wake up, but not always when I need to go to bed. It is just not as easy to fit a night shower into my schedule as it is a morning one.
To be fair, night showers aren’t useless. They’re a good way to wind down, and I find myself taking them as a way to clean up, especially after sports. In fact, during the summers, I consistently shower twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. But to answer which one is better, it will always be morning.
So if the goal is to feel more awake, more focused and more put together in the morning, not at night, the answer is clear. If I go to school with bedhead, a dry face and a groggy attitude, I know I’ll regret it.