“Have you heard of revenge bedtime procrastination? How about bedtime procrastination in general? Even if you’re not familiar with the terms, you might’ve developed one of these sleep habits. Maybe, after an intense day of working, parenting, and doing household chores, you notice that the day is almost over. Perhaps you sit down on your couch at 9 p.m., and even though it’s time to transition into your bedtime routine, you stay up until all hours of the night, falling down various internet rabbit holes or otherwise soaking up that extra time to yourself. Yes, you know you’ll pay for it in the morning, but that’s not the problem you’re worried about right now. It turns out this habit has a name.
Revenge bedtime procrastination is a relatively recent term that has gained traction on social media, but regular old bedtime procrastination has been around. “This is not a new concept,” Rajkumar Dasgupta, M.D., assistant professor of clinical medicine and the associate program director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, tells SELF. “Many people have procrastinated at bedtime for a while.”
Your late-night habit must include three components to be considered bedtime procrastination, according to a 2020 exploratory study on the subject published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Your late nights have to reduce your total sleep time, you can’t be up late for an external reason (like to tend to a baby or because you’re not feeling well), and you have to be aware that staying up will lead to negative consequences. So if you’re up watching mindless television and you know you should go to bed because you need to be up in four hours, you’re a bedtime procrastinator.
What makes revenge bedtime procrastination so unique? It’s not so much the execution but the feelings behind it. The “revenge” part comes in if you’re staying up out of frustration because work and other responsibilities have encroached on your time.”
Read what you can do about Bedtime Procrastination at Self.com