Picture this: you are sitting with a group of friends chatting. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been friends with these people or the context of conversation. This question will inevitably come up at some point in your relationship.

As you continue to talk, the topic of conversation shifts and the next thing you know, someone asks you, “Do you wear socks to bed?” Upon hearing this, everything turns to slow motion as your heart rate quickly increases at an alarming rate. All of your thoughts scatter as your mouth starts to form the blasphemous statement which takes an eternity to say, “Yes, I wear socks to bed.”

Everyone turns with looks of disgust as if you had just committed a crime. In the awkward silence that follows your answer, “Dies Irae” begins to slowly play in your head as you await the same response that you heard from a myriad of other people. “What? You wear socks to bed? That is so weird!”

Now this may seem a little dramatic, but for anyone who has ever answered the question of if they wear socks to bed with a yes, they understand my sentiment. No matter how long I have known a person, when this question is asked, they always give the same response. But why?

I like to wear socks to bed! I just had to get that off my chest. As long as I can remember, I have worn socks to bed, especially during the winter. It does not matter if the rest of my body is overheating from the weight of twenty blankets, my feet are in a perpetual state of being frozen. Just because I go to sleep with socks does not necessarily mean that I wake up with them on in the morning. Contrary to what non-sock sleepers might think, it is possible to take off socks in the middle of REM sleep if one feels so inclined.

So why do people think that wearing socks to bed is “not normal”? I’ll have to paraphrase Shakespeare’s when I say “If we sleep with socks on, do we not bleed?” There are only two reasons I can think of why sleeping with socks on might be frowned upon: one is that it does not allow your feet to “breathe” when you sleep and the other is that blankets should be enough to keep your feet warm. To both of the arguments, I say who cares? We all use different methods to help us fall asleep and some people, myself included, need their feet to be warm to get a good night of sleep.

Just ask yourself, do the sleeping habits of others really affect me enough to judge them? The answer is probably not. I don’t see people coming at the throats of those who listen to rain noises to drift off at night the way they do for those who wear socks at night. The double standard needs to end.

According to Sleep.org, “Research suggests that wearing socks to bed can help people not only fall asleep faster, but sleep longer and wake up fewer times throughout the night. One study found that young men wearing socks fell asleep 7.5 minutes faster, slept 32 minutes longer, and woke up 7.5 times less often than those not wearing socks.”

So while I’m enjoying my extra minutes of sleep resulting from my warm feet, I ask for one favor. To the people who may be reading this who pick on those who wear socks to bed:I implore you, wear socks to bed just one time and enjoy the extra sleep like me.