Article : ‘Revenge Bedtime Procrastination’ Is Real, According to Psychologists

Title - ‘Revenge Bedtime Procrastination’ Is Real, According to Psychologists

Subtitle - You know that thing where you stubbornly stay up late for no reason because you feel like you didn't get any time to yourself? Here's how to stop.

Link : https://www.glamour.com/story/revenge-bedtime-procrastination-is-real-according-to-psychologists

 

The article I linked is rather limited and could be a lot better. It links the problem it describes to technology and scrolling on smart phones when we should be sleeping. But I would say bedtime procrastination pre-dates social media and modern technology by many centuries. If your life is really crap, for any reason whatsoever, then you almost certainly need some private time every day where you can do what you like or read what you like or talk to whomever you like.

 

Seems a bit on the wrongly thought about side to me.

I can, and do, several times a day, fall asleep in front of a screen.

What I seriously struggle with is falling asleep in bed - which I admit does lead to me tending to go to bed later, but experience has shown me that if it, say, takes 2 hours to go to sleep in bed, at 4-5am - going to bed at midnight doesn't make that any earlier.

In fact the whole process is so disruptive that it may well not be until 6-7pm - after 6 or 7 hours 'lying' there, vs 2 hours.

 

I have never been someone who could regularly fall asleep in front of a screen, although it is sometimes starting to happen now as I get closer and closer to being a decrepit old fart.

I was sent to bed before I was sleepy and wasn't allowed to read when I was a child. My parents thought that by forcing me to go to bed at the time they wanted me to, then I must fall asleep (because that is what they would do, so it must be the same for me, right?) and would get up at a time they thought was appropriate. But that didn't happen. Instead, they set me up for a lifetime problem with insomnia. After you've spent almost 10 years as a child spending many, many nights lying awake for 6 - 7 hours you don't learn that going to bed is a time and a place to go to sleep.

The other thing that didn't help is that I shared a bedroom with my sister. And if I did fall asleep there was a danger I would snore. My sister decided that the perfect way to stop me doing that was by hitting me as hard as she could - and she was surprisingly strong despite being quite a bit younger than me. And if I did try and sneak a book into bed and turned a light on after my parents went to bed, either my sister would scream at me, or one of my parents would go to the toilet, see the light shining under the door, and come in and smack me round the head really hard. Yeah - that was going to get me to sleep how they wanted, wasn't it?

 

I often keep myself awake longer than I should. I'm sure lots of people do.

So take a thing (staying up doing stuff longer than you should), make up an explanation for it (compensating for lack of control in the daytime), and hope it starts trending. Indistiguishable from psychobabble to me. I do the thing, but the explanation doesn't fit, I have loads of control over my time during the day. I'm not lonely, I don't have quarantine depression. (Doth I protest too much? Does that prove that I'm fooling myself and they must be right?).

I'm up later than I should be now, after listening to music on youtube, checking the forum, reading that silly article, etc etc. Because I enjoy it, I lack discipline, and I don't have to get up tomorrow morning.

I'm off to bed now.

 

Yeah, because the only leisure time I get to myself tends to be post-10.30 in the evenings, so here I am again ...

 

Just because it's not the reason that you stay up late, doesn't mean it's not a thing. It resonates for quite a number of people. To be honest a lot of the people who it resonates with already knew that it was why we did this, we just didn't know that we weren't the only one doing it for this reason. (I have done this regularly in my life and knew this was why I was doing it.)