Are your curtains usually open or closed?

It’s winter time, so our curtains are closed more often than they are during summer. It creates a cosy feeling, but it also helps to keep the warmth inside the house. People whose houses can easily be looked into from the street often keep their curtains closed as well. But it turns out that this is really not that good an idea.

This is why you should keep your curtains open during the day.

Research

During winter, it’s often still dark outside when you get up in the morning and when you get back to your bedroom in the evening after a long day, it’s dark again already. For that reason, a lot of people keep the curtains in their bedroom closed all throughout the day. However, research from the University of Oregon shows that it’s much better to open your curtains in the morning.

Bacteria

According to the findings of the researchers of this American university, the chance of getting the flu increases if you keep your curtains closed the entire day. The researchers claim that natural light kills certain bacteria that hole up in our rooms. The conditions in darkened rooms are supposedly so beneficial to these bacteria that they survive and affect us negatively. In other words: we can get the flu because of them.

Findings

To come to these findings, the researchers set up eleven tiny rooms that were all identical to one another. The only difference between the rooms was the amount of sunlight that came in. After ninety days had passed, the researchers examined the rooms. They found out that the darkest room contained twice as many bacteria as the room that did get a lot of light.