Dealing With Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
How to confront the gatekeeper of your conscious and unconscious self.
Sleep is a torturous affair for many of us. We want to stay awake when we’re awake, and stay asleep when we’re asleep. It is that pesky transition that gets us, that stubborn gatekeeper between both realms of consciousness that urges us to stay.
In college, I saw sleep as a disruptive event, a treachery against fun and I put it off as long as possible. This, despite having a full class load and grueling training schedule on the swim team.
The consequences to my health were fairly immediate. I’ve never been more tired than I was at this time in my life. It got so bad that during class, I figured out a pose where I rested my forehead on my hand and had a pencil the other so that it looked like I was working, even though my eyes were closed, as I wandered magical fields with purple goats and talking trees. My body broke down. I became moody and snappy. My grades plummeted. I swam slower and became forgetful.
Six weeks into this foolish experiment, I returned to a normal sleep schedule — and was amazed as my quality of life soared upwards. Every important touchpoint in my life improved.
Years went on and I was mostly good with my sleep schedule until my finance career picked up. I stayed at the office later, and barely found time to exercise and make food when I got home. All of my hobbies were pushed to the wayside and I felt like I had no chance to get things done.
And yet again, I fell into this nasty habit of putting off sleep. I saw it as an opportunity to reclaim time and relax more. What would an hour or two matter anyways? Unfortunately, it started to add up and history repeated itself. The moodiness returned. I yawned all day, and coworkers barbed me, asking if I’d been out partying all night. My alarm started hitting way harder. Worst of all, my work performance slipped and I got my first bad performance review.
Sure enough, when I corrected my sleep, I was firing on all cylinders, feeling like a million bucks. It was all so painfully simple.
I’d fallen victim to revenge bedtime procrastination, which describes people’s tendency to carve into sleeping time to get back more free time that their jobs, lifestyle, and parenting don’t allow. Specifically, this comes down to control — and feeling like you don’t have it during the day.
Per the CDC, around 70 million Americans have chronic sleep issues. Even worse, insomnia affects more than a third of US adults at some point in their life. Nearly 40% of adults reported falling asleep once without meaning to in a given month. This is probably not revelatory information for most of you, but the problem persists, and bedtime procrastination is a key contributor.
This subject bifurcates audiences because sleep is difficult for a swathe of the population, and seemingly effortless for another. My partner can fall asleep within five minutes of closing her eyes, almost like she was hit with a tranquilizer dart. We’ll sit in bed at night, and just after the lights turn off, I’ll say, “Babe? What do you think…”
Only for me to realize she’s fully out.
I’ve never met a single person who wishes they were less well rested. Yet so many people are still tired and willfully skipping out on rest, given the opportunity. Why?
A friend of mine frequently procrastinates on sleep and can’t seem to reverse the trend. When I asked him why he delays, he said, “Because the next thing I do after going to sleep is go to work.” It was telling.
Most sleep advice we get is so straight forward. Don’t play on your phone before bed. Turn on blue light filter. Don’t blast loud music before bed. Don’t drink caffeine or take stimulants within six hours of bedtime.
But how do we contend with bedtime procrastination?
Be militant and think unconventionally
I’m typically in bed nine hours before I need to wake up because I know I’ll want to read a bit and give myself time to fall asleep. It can be rather boring to go from being awake to sleeping, as one state offers you little during its activity other than fevered dreams.
The Hindu guru Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi said that sleep is a pure state. Within it, there actually is a separate consciousness that is fully realized and it exists in “total ignorance of the waking state.”
Thinking about sleep from this unorthodox perspective (as almost all science posits that sleep is an unconscious state), can help lend a sense of control and make sleep feel less like the death of a conscious self, and all the fun it entails.
Confront your mental gatekeeper
If an unconventional approach doesn’t work, remember that the resistance you feel to sleeping is little different than your childhood rebellion against your bed time. It’s a conflict between what famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman categorized as System 1 thinking (automatic, reactive) and System 2 thinking (the conscious decisions and analysis you do).
I’ve found that the mere awareness of this conflict helps me manage my sleep, and hold myself accountable to a schedule. I see the procrastination lurking before it happens.
Revenge bedtime procrastination may not be an explicit decision in many cases, but it’s often preceded by some version of the thought, “Wow. I’ve been so busy all day.”
Remember that procrastinating on sleep is an exceptionally weak proposition on paper, and won’t make your life better.
I sometimes envision a world where every person is well rested each day, and how that would look and feel. I suspect airports would be more pleasant. Offices would be more productive. There’d be fewer disagreements and bickering. Heck, there may even be fewer wars and divorces.
The perplexing thing is: most rational people already know this. Every study points to the same result: sleep — good, no sleep — bad. One study in the UK found that people who improved their sleep quality over a four year period, got the same wellbeing benefits as eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, or from winning up to $280,000 in the lottery.
So spare yourself, and the rest of us, from the suffering and negative energy your willful sleep deprivation summons into this world. Do not take revenge on your unconscious self by clawing back needed sleep.
Don’t let your sleep gatekeeper trick you into thinking going to sleep is a death of the conscious self. Important things are still happening and, as Bhagavan suggested, your other self is doing his or her work too.
To the sleep deprived among us, I challenge you to remember how tired you were when you woke up this morning when it’s time to go back to sleep tonight. Then, ask yourself if revenge bedtime procrastination is really worth it.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.