Why We Stay Up Late to Reclaim the Day

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"Just five more minutes and I'll sleep!" — Hong Kongers face real demands at work and in keeping up relationships with family and friends, and a hurried, hectic life has become the norm. Along the way, we often lose the precious moments of relaxation and solitude that are ours alone.

Coming home from work to the comfort of your own place, wanting to unwind a little is only human. But have you ever found yourself meaning only to relax for a while, then realising you have stayed up until the small hours — your eyelids barely able to stay open, yet still unwilling to go to sleep? You satisfy a fleeting desire at night, but pay the price the next morning: low on energy, your work suffers, and coming home carrying that stress makes you dread the next day's work even more — making you long all the more to ease that stress through relaxation, which once again squeezes your sleep, creating a vicious cycle of staying up late.

Do You Have Revenge Bedtime Procrastination?

Watching videos on YouTube, scrolling reels on IG, playing games — these are all activities we tend to do during revenge bedtime procrastination. But under what circumstances does doing these things count as relaxation? And under what circumstances does it become revenge bedtime procrastination? The 2 hallmarks of revenge bedtime procrastination:

Using time that should be for sleep to do other enjoyable things instead. For example, you need to get up at 8 the next morning, but at 1 in the morning you are still looking at your phone, leaving you with less than 8 hours of sleep — only then does it count as staying up late.
You know you should sleep, yet you cannot bring yourself to do so. It is not that you choose not to sleep; rather, you lack the motivation to stop the enjoyable activity.

Why Do We Procrastinate at Bedtime?

A lack of Me time (time that belongs to ourselves): work takes up a large share of our lives, and the fragments of time left over are not enough for us to fully enjoy the activities we love. Since there is not enough time during the day, the hours of sleep at night become a substitute for that lost time to relax.
Stress: revenge bedtime procrastination is linked to stress and poor mental states. While stress is not necessarily the cause of revenge bedtime procrastination, as stress grows the procrastination tends to worsen; and the relaxing activities we turn to when staying up late may be one of the ways we relieve that stress.
Compensation: compensation means that when we suffer setbacks in life, we want to make up for them by excelling somewhere else. For example, when we perform poorly at work, once we get home we want to do other things we are good at, to compensate for the sense of failure at work.

Revenge bedtime procrastination may look like a way of rewarding yourself for working hard, but the effects of staying up late may already outweigh the satisfaction you can gain from it.

The Effects of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

While a night or two of staying up late will not do too much harm to the body, long-term sleep deprivation compresses sleeping time, leading to problems such as reduced creativity, slower reactions, declining memory, and an inability to cope with demanding work. All of these lower the efficiency and quality of our work, indirectly adding to our stress — and stress is precisely one of the causes of revenge bedtime procrastination.

How Do We Solve Revenge Bedtime Procrastination?

Putting down the phone means facing reality and giving up the only window of enjoyment you have before work. Such a habit can seem very hard to break, but there are ways to help us rebuild good habits.

Sleep hygiene: keeping our sleeping environment comfortable can make us more inclined to sleep. Specifically, you can build the following habits:

Build a regular sleep routine, with set times for going to bed and getting up, and no lying in bed
Before bed, do something relaxing for the mind, such as reading, listening to music, doing relaxation exercises, or taking a warm bath
Other than sleeping, do not lie in bed
If there are unresolved problems, try writing them down on paper, tell yourself you will deal with them tomorrow, and then go to bed
Turn off the lights as soon as you get into bed
Do not read, look at the news, watch television, or listen to the radio and music in bed

2. Self-Love Therapy: in a state of self-care, we are able to appreciate our own achievements in physical, psychological, and mental development. In this kind of therapy, we can come to realise that compressing our sleeping time in order to enjoy a little more private time is not a reward to ourselves, but an act that harms us. The therapy includes:

Writing down the reasons that lead you to stay up late, such as work stress or a love of your interests
Understanding that loving yourself is not about indulging in activities while neglecting sleep, but about building good habits
Planning out your own time well, and trying as far as possible not to compress it into your sleeping hours

This kind of therapy can encourage us to accept our strengths and weaknesses, cultivate compassion, focus on our goals, and feel satisfied with our own efforts. Research indicates that people who have undergone this therapy effectively reduced the frequency with which pre-sleep activities spilled over into their sleeping hours, and the duration of these activities; this in turn also reduced other habits harmful to the body.

Sincerely Embrace Yourself, and Find True Happiness

On the day after revenge bedtime procrastination is when we often face the emotion of regret. We may regret not falling asleep earlier to restore our energy, or regret indulging in personal interests and forgetting about work, which adds an extra burden on top of already heavy stress. We often chase perfection, and the moment we deviate from the plan we fall into self-denial and self-blame, which in turn adds to our stress and makes the revenge bedtime procrastination even worse.

Yet only by sincerely embracing ourselves and deeply loving ourselves, while also learning to arrange our time sensibly, can we effectively curb the behaviour of revenge bedtime procrastination. This is a gradual process of improvement, one that requires us to cultivate healthy daily living habits. When we cherish and accept our own imperfections, we can break free from the negative cycle and reclaim a life full of vitality and balance.

References

Alqo'idah, W., Nabila, T. Z., Ar-raza, M. F., & Supradewi, R. (2023). Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: A Self-Love Phenomenon or Revenge Against Yourself? Jurnal Psikologi Perseptual (Online), 8(2), 138–148. https://doi.org/10.24176/perseptual.v8i2.10229

Kroese, F. M., Nauts, S., Kamphorst, B. A., Anderson, J. H., & de Ridder, D. T. D. (2016). Bedtime procrastination: A behavioral perspective on sleep insufficiency. Academic Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978

Maulita, F. A. (2020). Representasi self-love dalam video klip bts era love yourself. Universitas Islam Indonesia. https://dspace.uii.ac.id/bitstream/handle/123456789/29424/16321146 Farah Afifah Maulita.pdf?sequence=1

Siu. (n.d.) Insomnia. Institude of Castle Peak Hospital. https://www3.ha.org.hk/cph/imh/mhi/article_01_05.asp

Suni, E. (2021). What is "revenge bedtime procrastination"? In sleep foundation. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene/revenge-bedtime-procrastination

Yasmin, & Fardani. (2020). Konstruksi makna love your self an mental health awarness bagi army (kelompok penggemar BTS) terhadap lagu dan champaign milik BTS. Jurnal Ilmu Komunikasi, 6(2), 207-2011. https://doi.org/10.35308/source.v6i2.2064

Centre for Health Protection. (n.d.) Sleep. Department of Health, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. https://www.chp.gov.hk/tc/statistics/data/10/757/5525.html

Why We Stay Up Late to Reclaim the Day

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Do You Have Revenge Bedtime Procrastination?

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Sincerely Embrace Yourself, and Find True Happiness

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