procrastinationsleep

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination Is Stealing Your Sleep

10 min read • Updated 21 September, 2023

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You need to go to bed but instead you open Netflix and start watching another episode of your favourite show.

It’s 03:00 in the morning and you have to get up in 4 hours to go to work, but you keep watching more and more YouTube videos.

You were about to brush your teeth and go to bed but instead you grabbed your phone and started scrolling on Instagram.

You haven’t been doing anything productive the whole day, just watching movies, but you need to finish all the chores, do the dishes, clean your room, before you go to bed?

Does it sound familiar? You are probably suffering from revenge bedtime procrastination.

What is revenge bedtime procrastination

We are all familiar with procrastination. Act of postponing important task or work that needs to be done, by doing something else. But what if you are postponing sleep instead?

You go through your day and when you are supposed to go to bed, to get your 8 hours of sleep, you start doing something else, something that gives you at least a little pleasure. You watch a show, scroll on the phone, do dishes etc.

It’s not like you would forget to go to bed, you are completely aware that you need to go to bed and that you will be tired the next day, yet you still do something to make yourself feel better.

And to take control over your life, over your free time. To take revenge on time that has been wasted during the day, may it be by a meaningless job you do, spending your days procrastinating, doing chores for others etc.

Not doing anything for you, anything you would consider productive.

And yes, procrastination can create more procrastination. Boredom increases inattention and that can lead to increased procrastination. And when you start fixing distraction with more distraction, it starts to spiral.

You spend the whole day watching shows, scrolling on your phone or watching videos, and when the evening comes, you start hating yourself for not doing anything, so you do something to make you feel like you have achieved something.

But then you go to bed late and wake up late, tired and groggy and start hating yourself for not going to bed earlier, and start compensating again, until evening comes, rinse and repeat. That’s is a very dangerous place to be, the self-hate loop.

Today it’s very easy to get distracted and slip into procrastinating, especially in the evening. Many people go to bed with their phones, with constant access to social media or streaming platforms to entertain us.

Bedtime procrastination results in poor sleep and sleep deprivation, which leads to slow thinking, low attention, bad memory, bad decision making, stress, anxiety and irritation. It can be left feeding the fire, stressing you to procrastinate more.

If not managed, chronic sleep deprivation and stress can lead to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, weaker immune system, pain, hormone issues, and mental health issues.

Fix what is broken

Revenge bedtime procrastination is an escape from the stress of the day. It is an attempt to get back the freedom you have lost. It is taking revenge on something that stole your time in the day.

Main causes of revenge bedtime procrastination are increased levels of stress, usually from work, school, or personal challenges like taking care of a family member, and low self-control.

Some groups are more prone to the bedtime procrastination - students who are staying up late, “night owls” and people with high amounts of daytime stress, working long hours and stressful and demanding jobs.

But also people working boring and unfulfilling jobs or people without a job, not doing anything during the day or stressing about making ends meet.

First step in dealing with revenge bedtime procrastination is to realise and accept that you have a problem. To be aware that you sleep poorly.

Start by tracking you time in bed. Track when you go to bed and when you wake up, and how you feel in the morning.

It doesn’t really matter how. Use a wearable, some app, your iPhone, log it in a spreadsheet, calendar, or even just on a piece of paper. Important thing is to start and do it every single day.

Then you need to look at revenge bedtime procrastination from two angles - 1) Why are you procrastinating? What are you taking revenge at? 2) How do you procrastinate? What is your medium?

Then you need to address both. Sure, solving and eliminating the reason why you procrastinate in the first place should be enough, but it is often not easy and not a quick process, so you need to work on both to give yourself a better chance.

There is no exact formula. You need to find your way, a way that will improve your life. If it’s a job, you can leave and find a new one, move to a different role or different team, get promoted and even demoted.

If you have the power, you can make changes in your role or your tasks, delegate more etc., but from my experience it is a long process to get it right and often with mixed results. Work just creates more work.

It would depend on how much you like other aspects of your work, and your expectation of how soon you want things to improve and how fast you want your life to change. How desperate are you.

Second angle is how you procrastinate. You need to define your medium - device, exact activities etc. Do you procrastinate by excessive cleaning of your home, or do you spend it playing games?

My kryptonite was always a computer. I was sitting behind the desk staring at screens all day. Full day at work and when I came home, I sat behind another desk again, behind another computer, getting comfortable.

There are several improvements you can make to this scenario - sitting behind the desk all day. Here is what I have done and I would recommend:

Another practice that helped me during all the steps was journaling. There are many ways to journal, but I write an A5 page every night, about a thought I had that day on my mind. How my day went, how I felt, what was bothering me.

Over time I have noticed I have regularly journaled about how badly I feel about the work, how it was stressing me, boring me and sucking a life out of me, helping me realise the root cause was my day job.

It also helped me to brainstorm more ideas on what I can improve in my life not only to deal with the bedtime procrastination, but in other areas of my life, many having positive impact on my sleep as well.

Evening routine is not the solution

Common approach to deal with the bedtime procrastination is to set an evening routine and find time for yourself during the day. Go to bed and wake up at the same time, no screens hour before bed, have personal “me” time during the day etc.

But in the hustle of the day, working, taking care of family, dealing with life, we can quickly forget about everything and focus on the immediate problem we have to deal with and kind of lose conscious control over our life.

All routines are just ideas unless you execute them regularly, and to build them into habits. They require a lot of self-control, which you don’t have. If you did, you would procrastinate in the first place, you would just go to bed.

You might do it for a few days but then you will slip back into your old habits and we are back when we started.

I am not saying the evening routine is useless, it is a great habit to have, but for the long game, for life, to improve the quality of your sleep (which is another topic by itself), but not a tool to stop bedtime procrastination.

Some might not be able to get rid of their main stressors from life and they don’t see a way out other than make it work and add some better routines. Then routines might be useful but I would look for a better solution.

I would urge you to dig deeper, find the way out, even if it takes years. It will take time, but do not give up. Life goes by faster than you think and there might be an opportunity in the future that will take you on the right path.

It took me 9 months last time I was finding a way out of my stressful job. For a few months I tried to make it work and then I focused on finding a better solution, finding a better life for myself. And I made it out and fixed what I needed.

My diagnose

My sleep schedule has been off since I can remember. For years I was going to bed “late”, regularly around 02:00, laughing at people who went to bed before midnight. I always felt too young to go to bed early.

I wasn’t giving it too much thought. I assigned it to being “night owl”, naturally more awake and more productive in the evening. And I didn’t have time to think about it. I was constantly at work or going out. Living a “life”.

About 4 years ago I left a job to take a career break, as I was starting to feel burned out from constantly working until late hours, carrying large amounts of stress from expectations and responsibilities.

And to recover my health, which suffered tremendously. I ate poorly, keeping myself awake with sugar, coffee and energy drinks for breakfast just to wake up, having fried fast food for lunch in the late afternoons, having dinner at midnight etc.

It took a few months after I left the job for me to start paying attention to my sleep habits/daily schedule and to accept that something is wrong and to be able to articulate the issue.

But before I was able to fix it, COVID hit and with it the new stresses from the disease, lockdowns, drop in income, taking care of oneself and people close to you.

I stopped paying attention to my sleep schedule and my evening behaviours, I just took it as a natural part of this turbulent time. There were more pressing matters to deal with rather than think about my sleep.

During the COVID I started to track my bedtimes daily and journal regularly, in which I often journaled about being tired, going to bed late, waking up groggy etc., which pushed me to give it a second thought.

I have assigned it to aspects of lockdowns - lack of socialisation, decrease in income etc. I knew the stress from the disease itself was not going to go away any time soon, so I focused on what I could fix and I got a new job.

It was fine at the start, I was able to regain some control over my life, improve my happiness etc., but six months in our company was sold and new management and new structure was coming in and I have realised I just replaced one stress with another.

It was pretty quickly clear to me that everything is going to change for the worse for me and I will be stuck in a dead-end job. Job where I have no say and no control over my work, no engagement or excitement.

I was stressed and my mind was bored, yet exhausted. I started watching videos in the evening to spike some excitement, to feel like I live and I am alive. Watching videos was one thing I could control.

There was no way to improve my situation in the company, my back was against the wall, so I decided to leave. The environment was not serving me and I was not willing to suffer every day just for some money.

Did it work? Yes. Once I made the decision and handed in my resignation, once I had one foot out of the door, the company stopped caring and the pressure decreased and I was able to start recovering.

It took me about four months to get my life organised again, as I had to deal with home renovation and sickness in the family, but every day I was pushing myself to consciously go to bed in reasonable time.

Big part of the process was that I took another work break. But now I took it to fix this, to deal with the bedtime procrastination and to get control over my life. To fix what was broken.

To change my mindset that I don’t have to complete everything in one day. To learn to prioritize sleep over everything, over any chore, any task, any work, any video or show. Leave it for tomorrow.

And now, I regularly go to bed around 23:00 (I would like even earlier, but my responsibilities do not allow it), and get up when I wake up naturally. No alarms. And I no longer wake up groggy or tired.

Keep fighting

I am a firm believer that life design and self-bettering is a life long quest. As you go through life, things do not stay constant, they change and process, and old ones will be creeping back to get you again.

And revenge bedtime procrastination is no different. It isn’t something you can solve once and will go away forever. New job, new partner, sickness, anything can happen and push you out of the balance.

You need to constantly pay attention to your sleep and your digital behaviours, but as long as you will have the right habits and right systems to help you, you will be able deal with it before it becomes a problem again.

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Marek Le Xuan

Hello there! I'm Marek Le Xuan, passionate educator, prudent planner, life-long learner, and Google Sheets lover. On this and other platforms, I share ideas, tools, and practices about entrepreneurship, self-improvement, planning and lifestyle design, so enthusiastic individuals and organizations like you can achieve their goals in life and business. My mission is to help you own it, be a badass and kick ass!