Bedtime procrastination: staying up when you meant to sleep

Bedtime procrastination means going to bed later than you intended when nothing is stopping you. It is sometimes called “revenge bedtime procrastination” when the late hours feel like the only time that is your own. Researchers have studied it in the general population, and some studies involve adults with ADHD symptoms.

This article is about the habit, not about sleep disorders or medication. Those are questions for a clinician.

What the evidence says

A meta-analysis found that bedtime procrastination was moderately linked to lower self-control and to being an evening type ¹.

In a pilot study of 51 adults who came to a psychiatry clinic with ADHD symptoms and played digital games regularly, the severity of problem gaming and a person’s chronotype each explained part of their bedtime procrastination ².

It usually does something for the person. In a study of young adults without insomnia that asked what staying up was for, the most frequent answers were regulating emotion, making up for the day, and social contact and belonging ³. In a study of young adults with insomnia, regulating emotion was the purpose behind about half of bedtime procrastination, and the researchers advised against approaches that simply block screens ⁴.

Records are used in clinics too. In a UK expert consensus on late sleep onset in adults with ADHD, 90% of the expert panel agreed that using questionnaires such as a 7-day sleep diary to monitor late sleep onset can improve how patients are managed ⁵.

What we don’t know

There are few tests of what helps. In the study of young adults without insomnia, a trial with 60 participants, people who received a behavioural programme cut their bedtime procrastination by 46 minutes a day compared with a waiting-list group ⁶. In a trial of an online programme, device use before bed fell by about 23 minutes a day, but it fell in every group, including the comparison group ⁷.

New routines are hard to keep going. In a small study in which adults with ADHD and insomnia tried a sleep robot, one participant put it this way: “the problem for us with ADHD is to keep our routines” ⁸.

Things to try

• Ask what the late hours give you. If the answer is quiet, reward or time to yourself, taking the phone away removes the benefit without replacing it ⁴. Finding that benefit earlier in the evening may work better.
• Keep a one-week record. Note when you meant to go to bed and when you went. A week of notes shows whether the problem happens every night or only on particular nights.
• Make the routine short. The participant in the sleep robot study described keeping a routine going as the problem ⁸.