Revenge bedtime procrastination

An individual may procrastinate sleep due to a variety of causes. Researchers have studied bedtime procrastination through both proximate explanations, which focus on the immediate psychological mechanisms that cause an individual to delay sleep, and ultimate explanations, which explore why humans might have developed a tendency for this behaviour over time. There is still little research using evolutionary frameworks to study bedtime procrastination, but recent studies have begun to address this gap.

The person may not consciously be avoiding sleep, but rather continuing to complete activities they perceive as more enjoyable than sleep (such as watching television, browsing social media or playing video games). There are many distractions in the 21st century; obtaining distractions to delay sleep is much easier than in earlier decades. These distractions create a sleep environment filled with artificial lighting and constant stimulation that differs from ancestral conditions, a phenomenon known as evolutionary mismatch. Researchers have proposed that mechanisms such as hyper-vigilance, which evolved to detect physical threats, may be triggered by non-threatening modern stimuli, contributing to sleep disruption. Evolutionary research suggests that sleep duration across species is shaped by tradeoffs between sleep and other activities, with humans sacrificing sleep when alternative behaviours offer greater immediate value.

Behavioural explanations have also focused on the role of technology. Problematic smartphone use directly causes bedtime procrastination. People who extensively use a smartphone are more likely to delay their bedtime because they find it hard to stop using the phone and keep getting distracted by it before going to sleep. These people enjoy the temporary satisfaction of smartphone use and want more time to entertain themselves. Smartphone apps deliver content through variable reinforcement schedules, where rewards appear at unpredictable intervals, a pattern known to produce persistent behaviour that is resistant to stopping. In addition, bedtime procrastination plays a mediated role between smartphone addiction and depression and anxiety. …

Bedtime procrastinators engaged in more leisure and social activities in the three hours before bedtime. High and low procrastinators spend similar amounts of time watching TV and using computers. In the three hours before bedtime, high bedtime procrastinators spent 79.5 minutes on their phones, while low bedtime procrastinators spent 17.6 minutes on their phones. People who stayed up late reported more symptoms of depression and anxiety, lower sleep quality, and a higher risk of insomnia than those who went to bed earlier.

Research from a survey of 317 participants in 2022 has shown that people's subjective perception of time is associated with bedtime procrastination. Sleep time perceived as the end of the day prompts people to think about the rest of their time. In the research, people who procrastinate before sleep often use their evening time to enjoy their favorite activities as a reward for the hard work of the day, focusing on immediate rewards and immediate benefits. Bedtime procrastination causes people to feel that time is passing quickly, which can lead to anxiety and stress.

For individuals who suffer from insomnia, bedtime is an abominable time. Sleep can become a task and a burden that increases people's worry about getting enough sleep, leading to nervousness, and increases their psychological stress. This can lead to a variety of negative health outcomes, including fatigue, mood swings, and difficulty concentrating.

Women, students, and "night owls" (later chronotypes) are most likely to experience bedtime procrastination. Differences in chronotypes may have served an adaptive function in ancestral groups by ensuring that some people remain alert to threats while others sleep. In modern environments, later chronotypes experience more bedtime procrastination because their biological clocks clash with early daily routines. However, other researchers argue that this mismatch increases the demand for self-regulation rather than replacing it as an explanation. People with high daytime stress levels are more prone to bedtime procrastination.

Bedtime procrastination comes in many other forms as well, such as delaying going to sleep (sleep procrastination) and delaying the time trying to fall asleep (while in bed procrastination). …

According to researchers, there are three key factors that differentiate between bedtime procrastination and staying up late:

People with higher cell phone use report more signs of bedtime procrastination. The media environment creates the atmosphere for sleep procrastination by providing plenty of fun pastimes before lights out.

Individuals who experience bedtime procrastination are likely to face effects related to the delayed sleep. A meta-analysis found that greater bedtime procrastination was associated with poorer sleep quality, shorter sleep duration, and increased fatigue throughout the day.

Bedtime procrastination results in poor sleep quality and can be a sign of poor self-regulation. Bedtime procrastinators are more likely to lose willpower, lose control of themselves, and fidget all the time. It is easy to cause a state of low interest, high dissatisfaction, and high distraction.

Bedtime procrastination can cause sleep deprivation, which leads to slow thinking, low attention levels, bad memory, bad decision making, stress, anxiety, and irritation. If sleep deprivation is not treated quickly, long-term consequences can include heart disease, diabetes, obesity, weakened immune system, pain, hormone issues, and mental health issues.

Bedtime procrastination can lead to short sleep, which can increase psychosis and may cause people to suffer from depression.

People who experience bedtime procrastination may also develop insomnia, suffering from sleep disturbance and may feel the need to acquire sleeping pills to fall asleep. Bedtime procrastination can lead a person to nap or experience microsleep throughout the day to compensate for lack of sleep.

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) is a self-regulation strategy that combines two techniques. Mental contrasting involves imagining a desired future outcome and then identifying obstacles in one's current reality, highlighting the gap between the two. Implementation intentions are if-then plans that create automatic cue-response links, so that the desired response is triggered without requiring conscious effort. The full process takes approximately five minutes: the individual identifies a feasible goal, imagines the best outcome of achieving it, identifies the main obstacle, and formulates an if-then plan to address it.

Studies suggest MCII is more effective at reducing bedtime procrastination than implementation intentions alone, as these have shown mixed results, narrowing the gap between planned and actual bedtimes but not improving sleep duration. After three weeks of MCII, participants went to bed on average 33 minutes earlier, compared to 14 minutes for a control group. Using MCII daily may be more effective, with participants procrastinating approximately 19 minutes less than those who performed it once, as daily practice allows individuals to adjust their bedtime goal to each night's circumstances. However, these findings rely on self-reported bedtimes.

BED-PRO is a behavioural intervention in which individuals first identify the emotional or behavioural function of their bedtime procrastination through functional analysis, then learn replacement behaviours that fulfil the same need without delaying sleep, reinforced through imagery training to support implementation. A study on 20 young adults showed that this reduced participant bedtime procrastination duration by an average of 63.8%, with additional improvements in sleep efficiency and daytime sleepiness maintained at one-month follow-up. A subsequent randomised controlled trial on 60 young adults supported this effect.

Media use interventions as treatment strategies for sleep insufficiency have been targeted mainly at reducing the volume of media use. This might not be a feasible scenario for the contemporary and future media user, given the immense proliferation of media at all times and the experience of being connected 24/7. Using a self-control perspective on electronic media use and bedtime procrastination could provide novel ways of approaching this issue. …