The phrase revenge bedtime procrastination rings strangely, and its meaning is, perhaps, unintuitive. Yet, it has seen lots of attention from the press and the public. What is the phenomenon of bedtime procrastination, and what is it revenge on? We investigate.
It is late at night. Your day’s work — day job duties, homework for your course, house chores — is all done.
You glance at the clock: it is past midnight already. You are all ready for bed and so tired that you could almost pass out.
However, instead of closing your eyes and drifting off to sleep, something else happens. You start reading a book, watching an episode of your favorite show, or adding one more row to that knitting project.
Before you know it, one more page has become five more chapters, you have binge-watched an entire season of that show, or all but finished your knitting project.
By this time, however, it is 3.00 a.m., and you know you have to wake up at 6.00 a.m. You are very tired, and you know you will be sleep-deprived, but you could not help yourself. Why?
If this scenario seems familiar, it is because many people around the world have been increasingly engaging in this form of behavior. This phenomenon has become so widespread that it has earned the moniker: revenge sleep procrastination.
What is revenge bedtime procrastination, why does it happen, and who does it affect? Are there ways to modify this behavior to avoid sleep deprivation? In this Special Feature, we investigate.
The concept of bedtime procrastination first came up in a study paper by Dr. Floor Kroese — a behavioral scientist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands — and colleagues, which appeared in Frontiers in Psychology in 2014.
Dr. Kroese and her collaborators described bedtime procrastination as the act of “going to bed later than intended while no external circumstances are accountable for doing so” — that is, choosing to delay bedtime without a practical reason for this delay.
One study that appeared in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2020 focused on adolescents, the most obvious bedtime procrastinators.
This study found that many adolescents put off sleep to watch videos, listen to music, or send text messages. However, the reasons behind this purposeful delay remained unclear, and the study did not address this phenomenon’s occurrence in adults.
Besides, why should bedtime procrastination be an act of revenge? Who or what are bedtime procrastinators taking revenge on?
Source: Medical News Today
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