Bedtime Procrastination: Why You Stay Up Later Than You Meant To

You meant to be asleep by eleven. It’s now twenty to one, you’ve been tired since about nine, and nothing has kept you up except your phone and a vague reluctance to let the day end. You aren’t even enjoying it much. You know you’ll regret this hour at 7 a.m., and you keep scrolling anyway.

Researchers have a name for this, and so does the internet. The standard advice, to just go to bed earlier, tends to miss where the delay happens, which is usually somewhere between the sofa and the bathroom sink.

Where the Term Comes From

“Bedtime procrastination” was coined in a 2014 paper by a group of Dutch psychologists. They defined it as going to bed later than you intended when there’s no external reason for it. A crying baby or a late shift doesn’t count; the delay has to be your own. In their survey, people who procrastinated more in general, and who scored lower on self-control, were more likely to put off going to bed. Those who put it off more often also reported not getting enough sleep.

Kroese, F.M., De Ridder, D.T.D., Evers, C. & Adriaanse, M.A. (2014). “Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination.” Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 611.

Two years later the same team surveyed about 2,400 Dutch adults. More bedtime procrastination went with insufficient sleep and more fatigue, and the link held after demographic differences were taken into account.

Online, the habit picked up a more dramatic label. “Revenge bedtime procrastination” started on Chinese social media and spread in English around 2020. It describes people whose days are taken up by work, a commute or children, and who claw back the late evening because it’s the only time that feels like theirs. The word “revenge” isn’t part of the scientific definition, though it does explain why staying up can feel like a small protest against a day that belonged to someone else.

Why It Happens at Night

The usual explanation is simple. Self-control tends to be at its lowest late in the evening, after a full day of making decisions and holding back. At 11 p.m. the plan to sleep is competing with something that pays off right now, and that something is usually built to keep going: autoplay, or a feed with no bottom. It’s a plausible account rather than a settled one, though it matches how the habit feels from the inside.

It also matters where the delay sits. Very few people lie in bed refusing to sleep. What gets postponed is the chain of small jobs before it: closing the laptop, getting up off the sofa, brushing your teeth, finding the charger. Each one is a separate decision and a separate chance to drift, so a firm bedtime on its own doesn’t help much if nothing starts the chain.

What It Costs

A 2022 meta-analysis pulled together 43 studies. Across them, people who procrastinated more at bedtime slept for less time, rated their sleep as worse and felt more tired during the day. None of that will surprise anyone who has done it.

Hill, V.M., Rebar, A.L., Ferguson, S.A., Shriane, A.E. & Vincent, G.E. (2022). “Go to bed! A systematic review and meta-analysis of bedtime procrastination correlates and sleep outcomes.” Sleep Medicine Reviews, 66, 101697.

Phones are the obvious suspect. In a survey of 844 Flemish adults, using a phone after the lights were off was associated with later sleep, poorer sleep quality and more symptoms of insomnia. It was a one-off survey, so it can’t show cause and effect. Someone who expects a bad night may reach for the phone precisely because lying in the dark feels pointless.

Exelmans, L. & Van den Bulck, J. (2016). “Bedtime mobile phone use and sleep in adults.” Social Science & Medicine, 148, 93-101.

If you go to bed on time but then lie awake for long stretches most nights, that’s closer to insomnia. It’s worth raising with a doctor rather than fixing with a new evening routine.

What Tends to Help

There’s much less research on fixing bedtime procrastination than on what it’s linked to, so treat these as experiments. The first is to pick a time to start winding down, not only a time to be asleep. If you want to be asleep by eleven, the real decision point might be 10:15, when the laptop shuts and the living-room lights go down. Set an alarm for that, not for bedtime.

Charge your phone in the kitchen or the hall, and buy a cheap alarm clock if the phone has been doing that job. You can still scroll on the sofa, but not in the dark, which is the version the Flemish survey pointed at.

If your evenings are short, give yourself some real leisure earlier. When your only free hour starts at 10:30 you’ll defend it, which is the whole point of the revenge idea. Moving even part of that time to 8 p.m. (a walk, a call with a friend, the show you were going to watch anyway) can make the late hours feel less like all you got.

Keep the next step small, too. When the wind-down alarm goes, don’t tell yourself to go to bed. Tell yourself to brush your teeth, and then to turn off the lights. It sounds childish, but a small, specific action is easier to start than a vague one like ending the evening.

To see whether any of this changes your nights, use Lamplit’s free sleep log each morning: bed time, wake time and how well you slept, plus a Late screen tag for the nights you were up scrolling. After two weeks, look back through your sleep history and compare the tagged nights with the rest. In the evening, the journal’s Tomorrow’s intention prompt is a handy place to write down when tomorrow’s wind-down starts and where the phone will spend the night.

Log last night’s sleep in Lamplit and tag the late screen if there was one. It’s free.