Bedtime Procrastinator: the reason you can’t sleep

For a long time, we’ve known about the insomniacs: The people who go bed and then toss and turn all night, unable to fall asleep. But there’s another group of sleepless sufferers: Those who can’t bring themselves to go to bed in the first place.

If you’re exhausted and you know you need to sleep, but can’t bring yourself to close your laptop, get up off your couch, or stop organizing your kitchen cupboards, you may be a bedtime procrastinator.

“Bedtime procrastination is defined as failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so,” a team of researchers from Utrecht University write in a recent issue of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The study was recently highlighted in an article by Betsy Morais in the New Yorker online.

“It’s a longstanding puzzle in philosophy, since Aristotle: why it is that people fail to do what they know is good for them to do,” Joel Anderson, a researcher in Practical Philosophy who coined the term “bedtime procrastination,” told Morais. He says people want to go to bed on time, and yet many don’t.

The Experiment

The Utrecht researchers wanted to explore how procrastination behavior might affect health, and whether procrastinators were also less likely to do things like exercise and each vegetables (as previous research has shown) because both behaviors are associated with poor self-control.

The research team, led by Floor Kroese, surveyed 177 people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to assess what bedtime procrastination is and who is likely to do it. They asked participants to rate, on a scale of 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always) how much the following statements applied to them (“R” items are those that are not typical of bedtime procrastinators):

1. I go to bed later than I had intended.
2. I go to bed early if I have to get up early in the morning. (R)
3. If it is time to turn off the lights at night I do it immediately. (R)
4. Often I am still doing other things when it is time to go to bed.
5. I easily get distracted by things when I actually would like to go to bed.
6. I do not go to bed on time.
7. I have a regular bedtime which I keep to. (R)
8. I want to go to bed on time but I just don’t.
9. I can easily stop with my activities when it is time to go to bed.
Researchers collected information on participants’ demographics, general habits (“I generally delay before starting on work I have to do”), sleep schedule, and (self-reported) fatigue. Participants were also rated for self-control, conscientiousness, impulsivity, and action control.

They found that bedtime procrastination was a very real problem, and one that was associated with regular old procrastination as well trouble with self-regulation,defined by the psychologist Steve Stosny as “the ability to act in your long-term best interest, consistent with your deepest values.”