Remember those days when the 6-year-old you did everything you could conjure to ward off bedtime?
“I need a drink of water.”
“I’m hungry—can I have a snack?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Tell me a story…pleeease! …Just one more….”
“But I’m NOT SLEEPY!!”
Well, apparently most of us never grow out of it. A study last summer by Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that all of the 177 participants procrastinated when it came to hitting the hay, even though many said they felt sleep deprived!
Defined as “voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay,” sleep procrastination is really kind of crazy when you think about it.
The researchers’ diagnosis? We put off going to bed and mismanage our pre-bed time doing unnecessary things, thus harming our overall health and well-being. While, in some cases, procrastination can lead us to be more efficient and effective, this is not one of those cases.
It’s not like we’re putting off something we don’t want to do, like when we were kids. It’s probably safe to say that most of us think sleeping is awesome. (Especially if you have a great mattress.) So why don’t we go to bed when we’re tired?
Maybe it’s that childhood fear of missing out? Maybe the stress of the day is finally catching up with us and fueling the urge to mentally check out and binge on Netflix? Perhaps we buy into the notion that we can catch up on sleep later (which is not true, by the way)? Or we tell ourselves “just 10 minutes more” and then 15 minutes later remember we need to take a shower? Maybe we just have too darn much to do?
Floor Kroese, who led the study, told The Daily Beast that bedtime procrastination “may be a relatively modern phenomenon. We speculate that it is not so much a matter of not wanting to sleep, but rather of not wanting to quit other activities. With the development of electrical devices and the 24/7 entertainment industry, people may be facing many more distractions now compared to several decades ago.”
Our powers of self control are already considered at their lowest by the end of the day, and people who are already tired don’t always make the best decisions. So this whole procrastinating thing might be the result of a vicious sleep-deprivation cycle we do to ourselves.
We’ll stay tuned, as these sleep gurus intend to fine-tune their research to see whether people put off bedtime because they’re overloaded or just glued to “Breaking Bad” or funny cat videos on YouTube.
Are you a sleep procrastinator? Check out our next blog for great tips on how to kick this habit to the curb!
Sleep tight, Urbanites!