Unless you live with roommates or parents, chances are you no longer sleep with your bedroom door closed. After all, why would you? It’s your house/apartment and therefore you have all the privacy you need – why make yourself feel claustrophobic unnecessarily? However, there’s a good reason for keeping your bedroom door shut overnight, and it could just save your life.
- Roughly 60% of people sleep with their bedroom door open. I would have thought the number would be higher than that, but 60% is the figure uncovered by safety science organization UL. However, they recommend starting to do so if you don’t already because it could be the difference between life or death in the event of a house fire.
- If a fire breaks out, sleeping with your door closed could protect you. Having a barrier between yourself and the fire can help protect you from smoke inhalation, improve oxygen levels, keep temperatures lower, and of course prevent the flames from spreading quite so quickly.
- It could buy you time to get out safely. More and more synthetics are being used in furniture and even house-building materials, which means sleeping with your bedroom door closed could prove valuable in helping you escape safely. According to The Washington Post, the average time to escape a house fire used to be 17 minutes but these days, it’s three minutes or less because of all the flammable materials around our homes. That’s major!
- A new campaign called “Close Before You Doze” has been launched in support of this. The UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute launched the campaign as part of National Fire Prevention Week and aims to show people how important it is to keep your bedroom door closed while sleeping.
