By Ali Berg Entertainment 24.02.2026

“Forget What You’ve Heard – All My Best Work Happens in Bed”

Novelist Ali Berg makes her case for swapping the desk for the duvet.

It’s 3pm, and I’m back in bed, writing my novel against a looming deadline. The kids are out with my husband, the house unusually quiet. My laptop is warm against my legs, pillows stacked just right behind me, my words flowing.

This is when the ideas come, when I’m relaxed and unguarded.

I’ve always written my best work this way. I have vivid memories of being a kid, scribbling (retrospectively terrible, but at the time brilliant) “novels” long past bedtime, notebook balanced on my knees, cocooned under covers that felt like protection. My bed was soft and safe. It felt like the only place my imagination could truly roam.

Then adulthood happened. Working from home happened. And I learned that this wasn’t how serious writers worked. Serious writers sat at desks. Proper desks, with ergonomic chairs and good posture and that natural light you see in reels. So, during lockdown, I tried to become a desk writer. I shoved a desk up against the window, bought an expensive chair, added a second monitor I mostly used for emails, and downloaded apps that blocked social media and made me feel faintly virtuous every time one locked me out.

I even bought a walking pad to go under my desk, because Instagram promised it would revolutionise both my steps and my output.

I told myself, very firmly: this is where real work happens.

But my body had other ideas. Every time I carved out a rare moment to work on my novel, I’d sit, or stand, or walk, at that desk, open my laptop, and feel…nothing. The cursor blinked back at me. I adjusted my chair height, checked my emails, and scrolled my feeds. Then last year, burnout hit. A bit of a mental breakdown followed. I stopped being able to write at all. My desk had become the place where creativity went to die, so I ended up stepping away entirely.

Months later, when I finally felt ready again, I took my laptop back to bed, and something changed. The words came more easily, as if they’d been waiting for me to stop forcing them into uncomfortable positions. I wrote more freely than I had in months.

It reminded me of something I'd read ages ago about creativity needing safety and imagination not working in flight-or-flight. It’s why so many workplaces obsess over psychological safety. When your body's comfortable, your brain can actually wander and take risks. Stress makes you narrow. Comfort opens you up.

Beds, it turns out, are very good at signalling comfort.

They're where we rest, read, hide when we're sick. At my desk, I'm always a bit on alert, spine straight, feet flat. There's a pressure in that posture, this tension that sneaks into how I think. In bed, though, my nervous system seems to settle. Without needing to perform, my ideas feel braver and my words feel floatier and easier to digest.

It’s also where I’m most myself. It’s where I lie with my daughter before she falls asleep, listening as she spills the small, important secrets of her school day. It’s where I talk through worries and hopes with my husband at the end of the night. And when I finally fall asleep, it’s the only place where I feel completely uninhibited. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that my best ideas arrive in the same place as my most intimate moments.

I’m not alone in this. I recently read that Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Winston Churchill all wrote in bed, resisting rigid ideas of what work should look like long before hustle culture had a name.

So many of us were taught that beds are places to collapse at the end of the day, not places where ideas are allowed to begin. For some reason, modern health trends encourage us to draw boundaries between rest and ambition. But what if those boundaries are exactly what’s getting in the way?

These days, my desk still exists for emails, admin, clutter, and an ever-growing pile of online shopping parcels. But when it's time to write properly, to dig into the good stuff, I head to bed.

And you know what? I sleep better too. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but I’ve noticed that when I stop resisting what my body clearly needs and let myself work in ways that feel good instead of impressive, things start to recalibrate. My bed isn’t just where I rest anymore. It’s where my clearest thoughts arrive, and where my best work begins. In fact, I'm writing this right now, curled up against soft linen that smells of clean laundry, tea going cold on the bedside table.

Forget what you’ve heard.

Sometimes the most serious work happens in the softest places.